


Out Of The Blue

by deathmallow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Addiction, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hayhanna, Odesta, PTSD, Post MJ, Pre Epilogue, Recovery, everlark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 53,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4669307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/pseuds/deathmallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-war, Johanna and Haymitch take account, and try to learn to live again, because the hardest fight is often after the battle's over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from MS MR's "Strings", which make a pretty good theme song for this fic.
> 
> AnnieCresta88 made a few wonderful [sketches for this fic!](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Het_Big_Little_Bang_Challenge_2015/works/4667636)
> 
> Big thanks to Melissa for betaing, and a quick turnaround.
> 
> Trigger warnings for non-explicit mentions of rape/non-con, sexual slavery, the Games, murder, torture, off-screen char death, and war-based violence and general THG unpleasantness. 
> 
> There's fairly frank dealing with alcohol and opiate abuse, withdrawal, PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation. It's my hope to depict something about those struggles openly and honestly in this fic and maybe help destigmatize mental illness even a little, but if they're a trigger for you, proceed with caution. 
> 
> Some of the initial sections of ch 1 are reused/revised from "Triptych", my other riff on a post-MJ canon-compliant Hayhanna. I used them here since I felt they set the stage well by letting us track the chars through that book, but if you want to see how some of the MJ-timeline things made a difference in where things went, give that one a read.

The pain of the fever was unsupportable, fire erupting and flowing through the core of Haymitch’s very bones like the hellishly glowing lava that had spewed from the volcano in his arena. Shaking, muscles cramping in rough shuddering spasms, feeling the cold slime of his own sweat on his skin, he reached again for the pail that was close to overflowing. Hopefully he got it all in the bucket, but it was hard to tell. It was a wonder there was anything left in his stomach at all. He’d long since passed the point of tasting thin, acid bile at the back of his throat when he puked.

He had so many dead and they all came to call, staring at him with empty sunken eyes in grey decaying flesh. His ma, Ash, Briar, Maysilee, the kids he killed in the Quell, all the dead Twelve tributes, the dead victors from this last arena. They came, and they judged him. They didn’t even have to say a thing. Just standing there looking at him, he and the ghosts both knew exactly why they’d died—Haymitch had fucked up and failed. Sometimes the mutts were there again, and butterflies were stinging him or golden squirrels were chewing off his flesh.

He’d had a few lucid moments when they first threw him in here, shortly after arriving in Thirteen, when he’d first started the shakes. An “isolation cell”—it was a hard cot with a rough grey blanket, the bucket because he couldn’t make it to the toilet now to puke, and a steel door with an observation window so they could stare at him like an animal in the Capitol’s Pennysound Zoo.

He figured they’d stared at him over—how long had it been? He had no idea. They’d stared at him, and sometimes he thought they came in and injected him with something or another, but maybe he was just imagining that as well. They always left in a hurry.

He was trapped in a cell and he was fairly sure at this point he might be dying, but that seemed only appropriate given that Peeta, Johanna, and Annie were in cells in the Capitol, probably dying as well. He’d told them he’d look after them and he’d failed them too.

He closed his eyes as the image of Johanna popped up before him, mutilated and dead, and he whispered a tired, “Sorry,” through his dry, acid-seared throat. He was tiring of failing everyone—he dropped his head back to the sweat-soaked pillow, tried to ride out the pain.

The door clanged open so loudly he lifted his head and opened his eyes. There was an older woman with long grey hair standing there looking at him, and a young man with glasses who he’d seen before bringing in the injections, so maybe this was real.

“He stinks,” the woman said bluntly, discussing him like he wasn’t even there.

Her companion followed suit. “He’s been in withdrawal for nearly a week, ma’am, that’s the smell of the vomit, and the toxins sweating out of him.”

“Please,” he said, licking his dry lips and looking up at the two of them with the mute appeal of an animal at extremes. He was begging them for liquor, or morphling, or death, he wasn’t sure which—deciding he might do better if he was specific, he managed, “Morphling?” But he was so tired and even those few words husked out of him like dry, rattling autumn grass in the wind.

“Let’s be clear. This is your own fault, Abernathy,” Ma’am said crisply. “Your drinking is your selfishness and weakness. It keeps you from being useful to everyone else. You’ll stay here until you’re completely sober and fit for the public, and I won’t waste any valuable morphling on the results of one man’s self-indulgence. You deserve some hardship—it’ll toughen you, dissuade you from that kind of weakness in the future. Heavensbee insists you can manage the girl, but otherwise, Abernathy, you’d be totally useless to me.”

He wheezed out a weak laugh at that, regretting how it hurt his ribs, already much abused from the constant vomiting. If they thought Katniss could be managed they had another thing coming. Especially after she made it clear she wanted to kill him. The scratches from where she’d tried to claw his eyes out had still burned when they threw him in here.

So whoever this was—some kind of authority figure here—held him in contempt and deemed him useless as well. Didn’t make her special, she had a lot of people to share that with. They were keeping him alive, making him suffer, so they could use him. It felt familiar. He rolled back over on the cot and huddled up against the pain once again, and he heard the door closing behind him.

When he left the cell after a month of isolation, or so they told him, he didn’t even want to look in a mirror. He couldn’t keep his hands steady and even walking to the viewing booth to where they were taping Katniss looking like a total fool exhausted him.

He wondered if he’d gotten so paranoid he’d imagined all that stuff with President Coin or not. It was hard to tell. Granted, she wasn’t warm and fuzzy towards him, but she wasn’t as icy as she had been then.

The whole period was one long muddle of agonizing pain and total confusion for him. It made him think of what the Capitol prisoners must be enduring because he’d failed them. Coin, or his vision of her, had been right. He deserved to suffer.

~~~~~~~~~~

It all blended after a while for Johanna. Screams and water and electricity, an endless cycle of pain that never abated before being renewed, sinking deeper and deeper into it and still trying to muster the strength to tell them Fuck you every time they came in again. Sometimes they questioned her about the other victors, about the rebellion. More often they didn’t, and that made it obvious that the point of this wasn’t information, but to break her. They’d shaved her head a few days ago for whatever reason. It wasn’t like they’d needed to do it to facilitate the torture. Perhaps they’d done it to upset her. Trying to torment her with an appeal to feminine vanity at this point was ridiculous. She’d already sacrificed her long hair years ago thanks to the Capitol, worn the skimpy dominatrix bullshit they forced on her—this was just the same old bullshit. Dazed, she rubbed her hands across the rough, uneven stubble left on her scalp. They’d made her plenty ugly inside already with all that they’d done over the years. What did it matter if they did something so petty to the shell of her?

It was worse hearing Peeta raving next door and shrieking at a Katniss that wasn’t there, betrayed and confused—what the hell were they doing to him in there? She didn’t know. All she knew was that his screams blended with her own in some unholy chorus, and there were other cries from down the hall: Annie. They’d bragged to her that they’d captured Finnick’s girlfriend from Mentor Central—what, four days ago? Who the hell knew how many days it had been? It might have just been hours.

Strapped to the chair again, she wanted to do nothing but sleep, but she knew the minute she did, they’d probably rush in and wake her up, tormenting her with her own vulnerability and exhaustion. So she stayed as awake as her muzzy brain could manage, left waiting for whenever they would choose to walk in and start it all over again. She didn’t expect anyone to come for them. And if they somehow did, it would be for the Mockingjay’s precious little boyfriend and Finnick’s girl—nobody cared about her. Nobody ever made her a priority, why would they start now? They told her that as they shocked her again and even as she made herself laugh and curse them, she knew they were right. She’d been written off once again. That was worse than the physical pain.

Finally the door swung open with the familiar shriek of hinges and she tried to not instinctively cringe. But it wasn’t the torturers. They told her they were from Thirteen, that they’d come to rescue her. A strong, tall man with silver hair and piercing blue eyes carried her because she was too weak to walk once they unstrapped her from the chair. This could be a lie too, because she couldn’t believe it was real. But she was too tired to resist it. Cradled against his chest, she finally let herself pass out.

~~~~~~~~~~

They were alive, though in Johanna’s case, he would say “barely”. The oozing cuts and dark bruises, the skin stretched alarmingly tight over that normally lushly curved, petite frame--she’d been through hell. Peeta looked roughed up, but not as bad. Annie, in comparison, except for the lack of clothes--whether they’d been kept there naked or the clothes had been so filthy they got rid of them in-flight--looked almost ridiculously healthy, to the point he wondered suspiciously if they’d done something else to her. But from the way she and Finnick hung on each other, kissing and murmuring and clinging, apparently her mind was as sound as it had ever been. He looked away, in part because despite the emotion overwhelming them to the point of making it utterly public, it was a private thing. He also looked away because of the sick, empty feeling in his chest at seeing them together, the dark pool of loss and loneliness and loathing and longing he could never quite eradicate that spread through him every time he’d see an affectionate couple, a family with a beautiful child. So utterly normal and mundanely human as to be unremarkable, except to those denied those things. _Not meant for you, asshole._

Besides, he had Peeta and Johanna to worry about. Far better that Annie looked OK, and now obviously he wouldn’t have to worry about Finnick and his freakouts and how he sometimes cried himself to sleep at night in their compartment. He was helpless there too. What comfort could he offer about that kind of terror? A worthless forty-one-year-old who’d closed him off from everyone rather than get them hurt. Better to keep silent and not offer meaningless platitudes.

He directed his voice in their direction, but politely averting his eyes. “Don’t mean to interrupt. I’ll be out tonight, Finn. Room’s yours.”

“Where are you going to sleep?”

“Infirmary, I suppose. Peeta’s there, and Johanna too, of course.” He belonged there, seeing the wreckage of the plans he’d made, the cost borne by other people. Suffering the guilt of it and doing anything he could do make it better, even what stupidly limited abilities he had as an infirmary worker.

“I should…”

“Nah,” Haymitch cut Finnick off with a shake of his head and an uplifted hand, not really in the mood to argue about it, wanting nothing more than to escape, and not wanting Finnick to flay himself alive with guilt. Much as it hurt, this was a good thing for those two, and they ought to rejoice in it. “She’ll be out of it for a while. I’ll be there in case, anyway. For you, it’ll keep till morning.” He nodded towards Annie, who looked at him with gratitude in her wide green eyes, making him look away. “You two tend to things here.” Turning his back on them, he headed for the elevator. Peeta first, because Katniss would be inconsolable until she knew he was OK, and his guilt demanded it. Johanna would have the doctors swarming over her anyway, as the worst case of the lot. A fresh pang of guilt hit him, though, to think of her alone in the infirmary, even as Katniss’ attention was solely on Peeta, and Finnick’s on Annie, and his would also be on Peeta first. Johanna had nobody there, anxiously awaiting solely for the hoped-for word of her being badly banged up but able to recover. Easy to be the one forgotten in favor of those who others fussed about so vocally. As soon as Katniss and Peeta were reunited, he’d go to her. He might be only a friend, but she shouldn’t wake up alone.

~~~~~~~~~~

When Johanna opened her eyes again, she saw Haymitch sitting in the chair next to her. Her eyes were drawn first by his now-short hair, shaved down nearly to the scalp on the sides, clipped close up top into fingertip-long spikes. It wasn’t a good look on him, but at least they’d done a more even job on him than the Capitol had on her. Then her mind cleared enough from that single-minded focus and she saw he looked terrible, almost like he’d been a Capitol guest himself. But he wasn’t. He just left us, and vengefulness flared hot and sharp.

But he was here, and when she thought about it, of course Finnick would run for Annie and Katniss for Peeta. She would have expected to wake up alone, so to have someone there, even Haymitch, meant something. “Hey,” she rasped, trying to keep as still as possible. Moving anything hurt far too much.

“Hey,” he returned, bloodshot silver-grey eyes studying her. He looked sallow, wrung out, and far too thin, like he’d dropped something like forty pounds in the six weeks since she’d last seen him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Hell, I even tried to come on the rescue party, but they…”

She closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him because it made her think of how pathetic she must look herself—starved, beaten, exhausted. She tried to shut out the memory of Peeta’s raving screams and Annie’s ramblings and the feel of her own muscles seizing from electric shock. “Yeah,” she said, cutting him off.

“This is…I’ll go,” he said hastily, and she could hear he was slow to get up, as if it was too much exertion.

“Yeah, sure,” she said bitterly. In all the time she’d known him, she could only make him feel a slight guilt over a couple of things. He’d always given it as good as he got in general, though, rather than running away like this—seemed like he couldn’t bear to look at her either. “Go tend to the kiddies, huh? They fucked up Peeta pretty good, I think.”

“We know,” he told her, “he halfway strangled Katniss to death.”

She laughed harshly until tears started rolling down her cheeks. “Good for him.” Johanna almost wanted to strangle Katniss herself at this point.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked it so softly that she couldn’t have heard him right.

“Might as well stick around, I’m gonna be great company,” she answered. Maybe Haymitch and his sense of guilty obligation were the only company she’d have, but at least he cared enough to be there. That was better than being alone right now knowing that nobody else gave a shit whether she lived or died. Or at least, that as ever she came low on their list of priorities. Katniss would be obsessing over Peeta. Finnick was probably far too busy fucking Annie. She didn’t fool herself into imagining Haymitch hadn’t looked after Peeta first, but at least he was here and he gave a shit, so she’d take him and his guilt if need be.

They chased Haymitch off while they redressed her wounds. She debated flippantly telling them it was no big deal because plenty of the victors had seen her naked in the Training Center, but passed on the opportunity. But then he returned seemingly the first possible moment. He apologized with a slightly snarky air, “No flowers or chocolates, Jo, they won’t let me bring ‘em.”

“I’d rather have some booze anyway,” she said crossly—alcohol would have dimmed everything for her, though the morphling in her veins helped too.

“You and me both,” and it hurt her aching muscles to laugh but it felt good anyway. They didn’t really talk, because they couldn’t talk about anything that really mattered, and to talk about stupid trivial things right now would have been almost obscene. He told her how the war was going, and then they lapsed into silence. After a little while of pure discomfort, it turned into the kind of silence that was simply no need for words to fill the air rather than not knowing what to say. He was sorry and he’d made it a point to come and look after her. She wasn’t sure if that was enough or if she forgave him for having to leave her behind. Granted, she’d agreed going in that she accepted she might die or be captured, but then she’d actually endured it. But still, it was far more than anyone else offered her.

She drifted off from the morphling into a blissfully painless haze, and when she woke up again she saw he was still there, scrunched into the chair beside her bed, head tucked down onto his shoulder as he’d dozed off himself. He looked tired and unsettled and haunted, even in sleep. She closed her eyes again, not sure if his being there made her feel safe enough to give over to the vulnerability of sleep—really, she couldn’t fully trust anyone for that, not Haymitch and not Finnick because they’d both abandoned her—but at least it meant she wasn’t alone.

~~~~~~~~~~

The weeks since the rescue had flown by much quicker than the interminable hell of the six weeks following the Quell. The war wore on, Two fell, and all that remained was to capture the Capitol now. At least Finnick and Annie had forgiven him for his particular failure in her case, even if he couldn’t quite forgive himself. In the weeks of her captivity he’d had enough visions of the girl he’d just finally met as yet another casualty alongside Johanna and Peeta to just let them out of his brain. His guilt stayed there like poison.

It didn’t help that not everything was put to rights by any means. Finnick and Annie were about the only two to have even the veneer of normality. Katniss still walked around like a ghost, and seemingly tried to get herself killed at every turn, maybe so she wouldn’t have to deal with the guilt and pain over the boy. Peeta still ended up raving and screaming for no apparent reason sometimes, and the sight of him constantly drugged and in shackles made something in Haymitch die a little bit more inside. He’d seen plenty of kids die. At this point he wasn’t sure they hadn’t gotten the better part of it against Peeta Mellark.

The boy’s confused, angry howls and contorted, rabid expression still featured some nights along with all the other phantasmagoric visions, until he gave up and took sleep syrup to get a dreamless rest. Especially as he had a new roommate with Finnick moving out—a Ten native, Dalton Sayers. Seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t a victor. Dalton wouldn’t understand the pathetic spectacle of a forty-one-year-old man screaming in the night like a scared little boy at things that weren’t there.

Johanna still was in the infirmary and he saw her with a morphling line attached to her arm more often than not—but given that he’d helped put her there, he wasn’t going to be the one to express concerns that after this long, she probably was more addicted to the painkillers than in need of them for pain. It wasn’t like he was anyone to talk about coping chemically, not with the booze and now the sleep syrup.

But today was a happier day at least. He’d been clever to take himself out of the dancing by volunteering as the fiddler. Watching Annie and Finnick out there taking their first dance as husband and wife, nobody could doubt that they made a fine pair together.

He itched for a drink of something far stronger than cider, though, thinking about too many other weddings. Weddings he’d been to with too many friends and family that were now dead. Weddings he hadn’t been invited to once the district made it clear he was their pariah. A wedding of his own that he’d never had and never would. Looking at the two of them, radiant in their love for each other, he wanted to believe in something as beautiful as the idea of forever, but he wasn’t sure he could. So he played his fiddle as best he could as his gift to the two of them, and let everyone dance and have a joyful day. If happiness might be fleeting, might as well live it up as best as possible. If it somehow lasted, then the memories would be all the sweeter.

Seeing Johanna standing off to the side, hanging back deliberately and not joining the dances, he spared her a slight nod. At least they understood each other.

~~~~~~~~~~

It was getting to be a bad habit, waking up in the infirmary with Haymitch there. “Johanna?” he asked, leaning over her, his ever-exhausted face coming into focus. The softness and concern in his grey eyes cut at her like a knife.

“Fuck you, Haymitch, go away,” she wanted to snap it, but it came out as more of a rough whisper. She could barely hold in the screams that still threatened to break loose. The water—they were either going to plunge her under and hold her there until her lungs cried out for air and she was moments from drowning, or they’d throw it on her and then shock her with the wires.

“Hey. You’re OK now.” No she wasn’t. She’d failed. That was all that mattered. As hard as she’d pushed herself, the running and throwing up and giving up the morphling—it had all been for the purpose of going to the Capitol and killing Snow herself. Fuck Katniss on that score, Johanna had far more claim to him. But she wasn’t going to get to do it. She’d failed. Weak. Pathetic. Even Peeta who didn’t even know what was real anymore had more chance than her now. She didn’t want him sitting there with that look on his face that told her just how broken she was, and so she did her best to make him leave.

“Like you even put your name in to go be a soldier,” she hissed, wanting nothing to much as to hurt someone, and he would do simply because he was stupid enough to be there and to try to soothe her when she couldn’t bear her own failure. “Don’t pretend like we’re the same, Haymitch, I at least tried.” She’d given it everything she had, and she’d still failed.

“I put my name in, Johanna,” he told her, his voice gruff but his eyes not wavering from hers, “and they invalided me out just as quickly as psychologically unfit.” He gave a tight, angry laugh. “Probably got plenty of ammunition for that notion when they took me off the bottle, I’ll admit. But dammit, if you could do the training given the rough shape you were in…I could have done it, I know it. I managed to get ready for the damn Quell.” The frustrated pain of being excluded and judged and discarded was right there in his voice; and it stirred the answering feeling within her. Suddenly Haymitch’s company didn’t grate the way a visit from someone like Finnick or Katniss would, if they bothered to show. They had succeeded, they would go and fight, and so their very presence would rub that sudden gulf between them right in her face. She’d almost rather they stayed away. Haymitch came here first, as he had last time, and she couldn’t scare him off.

He must have seen something in her face because suddenly he smirked but it was a tired expression. “Not much has changed, has it—they still want only the young and pretty and appealing ones for the camera, huh? They don’t want those of us that can’t quite hide how the Capitol knocked us around.” He leaned down and put a hand on her shoulder. “You openly told Snow to fuck himself. So you’re worth a dozen of any of them,” he said fiercely, and the look on his face told her he wasn’t just telling her what she wanted to hear.

Finnick and Katniss dropped by and she embarrassed herself there, begging Katniss to kill Snow. But at least by the time Annie came by, she was calmer, sniffing her pine needle sachet. Haymitch was still there.

Not like she’d interacted much with the new Mrs. Odair, though Finnick admitted Annie failed the intake assessment on psychological grounds. “So, kids,” she said, giving Annie and Haymitch a fierce smile, “looks like it’s us three crazies as the rejects.” She patted the bed, striving for nonchalance, but glad to not be left alone. “Pull up a seat, you two. Anyone got some cards or something, or have they banned that in this shithole as well?”

~~~~~~~~~~

He’d done his best to keep busy after the news about the entirety of Star Squad dying in the Capitol. But the few patients in the infirmary really weren’t in need of much help anyway, and Haymitch found they all carried too many reminders of the many, many dead. A fifteen-year-old boy had a broken ankle from military training. Haymitch tried to not look at him and automatically think about how quickly that would have killed him in the Games, even with as competent as the kid looked otherwise. He could rattle off eight fifteen-year-old boys from Twelve who’d died in the Games and picture all their faces, both alive and then later on the slab of the tribute morgue. No, nine. Toby Mercer’s birthday was the day before the interviews—happy fucking birthday to him. An elderly man had the flu, and his kind eyes and quiet demeanor reminded him too much of old Woof.

It wasn’t like the doctors needed him anyway to deal with such little things. So he busied himself tallying supplies and reorganizing shelves that were already pin-straight. They’d cut off the sleep syrup last week, saying he needed to stop using it as a crutch. Seeing the bottles of it, he reached up, hand open to grab one. He hesitated, remembering Katniss telling him about the preps chained to the wall down on the detention level, remembering the cell they’d thrown him in to live or die as fate decreed. They would notice. Twice-daily inventory, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out an employee of the infirmary took it. He knew they already eyed him carefully, as if he’d grab the rubbing alcohol at any moment and start swigging.

He looked down at the brown glass jugs of rubbing alcohol on the lowest shelf. Maybe he might do that, at least tonight. If it killed him, that was fine. He needed something, because it twisted and burned within him unbearably. He’d done this dance before, death coming in threes, wiping out everyone that mattered. Ma, Ash, Briar. Finnick, Katniss, Peeta.

What a fucking useless life—they’d all told him that, Peeta by drying him out and shoving him aside at the reaping rather than trusting him to die for the girl, Coin by drying him out as she had, Central Command by rejecting him from military training. At this point, his life wasn't even deemed worth enough to sacrifice it for someone else’s.

 _I can’t do this again_ , staring at the rubbing alcohol bleakly. Letting people in and seeing them all wiped off the face of the earth in one fell swoop, left to endure it alone—he hadn’t been strong enough at sixteen, he certainly wasn’t strong enough now.

“Abernathy?” he heard, and turned to see Doctor Harcourt there. “Get to your quarters already. It’s after midnight. Your shift ended hours and hours ago. Nothing needing you here.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, hanging the clipboard on the peg. _Nothing needing me anywhere, pal._ Banished from the infirmary, he’d have to just deal with it as best he could and hope it didn’t cause Dalton too many issues tonight. If he kept wandering the corridors, they’d end up forcibly shoving him in his room anyway.

Stepping in the elevator, he punched the button for the 11th floor. Though to his impatience, it stopped on the 36th floor, but he was surprised to see Johanna get in, punching the button for the 14th floor. In other circumstances he would have drawled a joke about her still being up from an urgent need for scrubbing undershorts after midnight. Tonight wasn’t that night. He knew what had kept her up.

All he could think with her standing in front of him, as he looked at the rigid set of her shoulders and the untidy mop of short brown spikes on her head, was that maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe she hadn’t cared for Katniss and Peeta quite as deeply as he had, but she’d cared, and she’d loved Finnick as a brother just as Haymitch had.

They were the same, weren’t they? Oh, they’d always been too similar to deny, enough that they carefully turned to each other. Always been so alone, always had that unspoken agreement that it was OK to be snarky and they would never make each other feel guilty for it the way other people did simply by being better and kinder, showing that somehow, they’d come through the Games with less scars. Yeah, well, they hadn’t had every loved one they had murdered on their account either. But now she’d felt what it was like to finally be pushed so far as to fall into a place where even the strongest willpower finally failed. She had gone down into to that bottomless darkness, with demons so bad that only chemicals that could make a too-smart brain somewhat hazy were the only fucking way to get through another day. They were just alike now in total defeat and he couldn’t help but grieve a little for that fact. All he could do was try to be there, because he’d had nobody there for him, and let her know that he’d been through it too. Maybe there was no light at the end of the tunnel, but he wouldn’t let her go to hell alone.

“Annie?” he asked, remembering she’d escorted Annie off. The abrupt end of the silence seemed to carry the startle of pistol shot from how Johanna jumped slightly at it.

“Sleeping, I imagine,” she replied, and she turned to face him. She looked at him, tired eyes in a tired face, and then she startled him in turn as she abruptly kissed him. He could feel the hunger in it—not desire, just the unbearable ache of solitude and grief, and he felt himself answering it, arms sliding around her, needing her there. Likely as not that desire had been burned out of both of them, but to find he wasn’t alone in this world, that there was somebody who could understand, moved him with a sense of relief. She glanced up at him. “So here’s the deal. You come to my compartment. We fuck it out.”

They’d slept together once before. Desire had nothing to do with it that time either, just coping with an unbearable situation. But this time she wasn’t a skittish seventeen-year-old facing her first patron—she was undeniably a woman now. She was asking for him to be a friend this time, not a whore, and that made all the difference. Besides, without alcohol or sleep syrup, sex and a few hours’ empathetic company seemed like as good a solution as any right now. He’d try about anything to get through this first grief-riddled night. Last time he’d been doped to the gills with sleep syrup to deal with severely burned hands. He couldn’t help the relief at seeing a spark again in those hazel-tinged eyes of hers, and to hear she didn’t suggest booze or morphling. Maybe there was some life in her yet.

The elevator stopped on the 14th floor and by way of answer, he followed her out, down the hall and into the dark of her compartment. He was glad that he couldn’t see, because seeing the empty bunk that had belonged to Katniss would have been too much. Much as he usually dreaded it, this time all-concealing darkness was a mercy.

~~~~~~~~~~

Johanna woke up as usual right when the lights snapped on at six thirty, and found two things. First, that Haymitch was gone, which relieved her, because that spared them both dealing with this morning. Watching him get dressed and either silence or inane chatter would have reminded her too much of when she was seventeen. He’d been smart enough to slip away quietly in the night. The chunky black emergency flashlight was on the nightstand rather than in the drawer where it belonged. He must have used it to find his clothes.

Second, the covers were carefully draped over her in a way that she knew had to be deliberate. That did remind her of being a teenager, but not awkwardly so—he’d done that for her the night she fell asleep on the couch in the Twelve apartment after drinking with him, trying to forget Finnick.

Well, they’d both done their best to forget Finnick last night. It said something about the depths of her misery that not being able to see him as she fucked him hadn’t scared her off the entire idea. But on some level, she must have still known that he was safe, that she could trust him.

Not that it had been gentle and full of sweet nothings—urgent and a little rough, more like. Compared to how dispassionate he’d been years ago, this time she’d felt just how much in him seethed beneath the skin. At least this time she felt like she was fucking a friend rather than a skilled whore. But it was about forgetfulness, not tenderness. They didn’t make any pretense at love. The only thing he’d said to her was afterwards, a rough murmur of _I’m glad you didn’t leave too_ , although there was an odd note in his voice she couldn’t quite place.

She hadn’t answered. Anything she could have said felt like it would expose too much. He had to know she was glad he was there too.

Pushing aside the covers and kneeling on the floor beside the bed, trying to not glance over at Katniss’ bunk and her clothes still hanging on their hooks, she gathered up her discarded clothes to throw them down the laundry chute. As she picked up her shirt, a pale grey button plinked to the floor. “Shit,” she sighed, grasping it between her fingertips and setting it on the nightstand. Looking over the placket to see which one it was, her brow furrowed as she saw it wasn’t one of hers, because they were all there. She must have ripped it off Haymitch’s shirt last night in her haste.

Scrubbed down with a washcloth and dressed, she tucked the button into the pocket of her shirt and headed for Annie’s. Somehow it helped to have her there, screwed up as that probably sounded. Someone else’s grief for Finnick logically beat hers, and that kept it from being a vast chasm—though nobody served as that person for Annie. As for Haymitch, he’d lost three in one fell swoop. She liked the kids, but she knew the old bastard had loved them. It looked like she would be the one to try to buck them up as best she could, even as she mourned her best friend.

After breakfast, Haymitch cornered her. She hoped like hell he wasn’t going to bring up last night at length. It was done, it had helped, but they didn’t need to agonize over it.

He looked at her a long moment, as if trying to find something to say. She met his eyes, not sure of what to say either. Everything seemed either too much or not nearly enough. Finally he nodded, and looked away. “I should go check on Annie.”

“Here.” She fished in her pocket and turned his hand over, pressing the missing button into his palm and holding his gaze with hers as she did so, somehow unable to look away. “You might want to sew that back on.”

~~~~~~~~~~

She barely saw Haymitch over the next few weeks, given that despite having quarters in the Presidential Mansion with the rest of them, he virtually lived in the hospital. How many hours he spent staring through a plate glass window at the burned bodies of the two teenagers that were his charges, Johanna didn’t want to know. She knew he must be thinking of mutilated, dead kids laid out on the slabs down in the tribute morgue. Probably thinking as well of Finnick, and however he’d died--if he’d asked Katniss’ cousin Gale for the details, he hadn’t told her. She had the sense he hadn’t asked. People who’d seen enough deaths didn’t need to know. Did it really matter whether Finnick had been shot or stabbed or devoured by mutts or melted by acid? He was dead, one more person in her life to mourn, and that was all.

The fact that the hospital let him sleep in a cot in an unused room, and they had a chair set up outside the burn ward for him, said more than enough. Yeah, as long as the kids were struggling on he should be there for them, willing them to stay alive, but he didn’t need her right then. That whole Twelve bond seemed to shut her out.

It was all too much. But she remembered how good that morphling calm had felt, how serene and clean. It was so easy to walk down the hall, down two floors to the emergency room, and get them to see her. A few whines to the Capitol doctors about chronic pain, pointedly showing off a few of her torture scars to make the point, and they couldn’t give morphling to her fast enough. She even won the argument, brief and pathetic as their attempts were, to have them give it to her so she could inject herself. “You think I’m gonna stay in this shithole longer than needed?” she said, enjoying the chance to finally tell a Capitolite off. “This fucking city where I got raped and then tortured by you people?” She could practically see them writhing as she grabbed their sense of fear of retribution and twisted it ruthlessly. “You want me to tell Coin you’re denying to treat the injuries you gave me?” Like Coin would care, given her Thirteen goons had cut off the morphling to begin, but these idiots didn’t know that. “Fuck you. I’m going to be using this stuff at home, so you’d better teach me how.” A brief lesson on finding the vein and giving an injection and they sent her on her way, feeling better than she had in months. She doubled the amount of morphling the doctors had told her when the druggist asked her what she needed. No chance she’d get caught without it again, on the bad days when she needed it.

Feeling that bold, liquid courage surging through her veins, she decided she’d go see Snow and tell the old sick fuck exactly what she thought of him before he died.

~~~~~~~~~~

Finding his way to Snow’s study, he cheerfully helped himself to the liquor cabinet. He’d guiltily nipped a little here and there in the last weeks, endlessly dealing with everything: Finnick, Katniss, Peeta, images of burned children. But tonight he intended to get openly and thoroughly drunk. Fuck Coin if she wanted to yap at him about it. Hopefully none of this was poisoned. Sinking down into a soft maroon leather chair by the fireside, he didn’t bother with a glass, sipping directly from the heavy crystal—whatever the hell they called it for brandy. Decanter? It was almost empty to begin, he’d have to get up and swipe something else to keep going.  
But the fire and the liquor couldn’t warm the chill from his bones. Snow died tomorrow and it changed nothing. Katniss was still dead inside, Peeta was still a ruin. He hadn’t saved either of them in the end. He hadn’t really saved anyone, had he? Too many had died in the last six months on account of his trying: Seeder, Chaff, Cecelia, Woof, Mags…Finnick. As if Haymitch fucking dumbass Abernathy could actually make a difference for once. When he got bright ideas, people just died or suffered.

He couldn’t bear it, thinking of all the dead friends whose ghosts now hung heavy around him. More burdens to bear along with forty-six dead kids and two destroyed ones. With one smooth motion he threw the now-empty bottle and watched it smash against the heavy stones of the fireplace, strangely satisfied at having simply broken something of Snow’s.

“Oh, it’s that kind of a party?” He turned to see Johanna there. She crossed to the liquor cabinet and grabbed another bottle. She turned to him and shook the bottle, a sharp-edged feral smile on her face. Her eyes glittered too bright, with a barely suppressed rage. Snow said she’d been by to see him as well-- to look at her, Snow had worked her over hard in that final farewell, just to mess with her. “Goodie.”

“Pull up a seat,” he drawled, sweeping an arm out to indicate the chair opposite, “but bring another bottle while you’re at it.”

“Figured I’d try giving your favorite method a whirl here,” she shrugged, handing him a bottle. After her struggles with the morphling that really ought to alarm him but somehow he didn’t have enough room to feel anything more tonight. He was already drinking to try to dull it all.

Reading the label, he wasn’t sure whether he was laughing or on the verge of retching. She hadn’t looked at the bottle she grabbed. This was a special commemorative treat for the Third Quell—bourbon that One had aged until this year before bottling it. Bourbon, Twelve’s signature liquor, distilled twenty-five years ago in honor of the Second Quell’s “victor”. “What, getting picky with your booze now?” Johanna said with a snicker.

He looked up at her, seeing her sprawled in the chair taking hefty gulps—not ladylike sips—of the amber liquid in her own bottle. She was still living and still fighting, she’d clearly found some of her fire again, and that helped keep the crushing guilt at bay for a little while. The faint glow of liquor already in him, far more potent for so many months without a good buzz, didn’t hurt that goal either. So he opened the bottle and toasted her, saying, “Let’s hope he rots in hell.” His talk with Snow hadn’t been exactly productive. The old man mainly taunted Haymitch with how destroyed his life was, and Katniss and Peeta too. He should have left well enough alone.

Things were a little bit of a blur after that, though in the pleasant way where he wasn’t gone by any means, he still was aware enough. Just meant everything was fuzzy enough it didn’t matter. Drunk was the only time in his life that nothing hurt.

He knew they’d stumbled upstairs, and he was with Johanna. But the satisfaction was of a savage kind, all a big _to hell with you_ to the man in the rose gardens below as two of his former sex slaves fucked in his own bed.

He must have said something aloud because Johanna laughed gutturally and said, “Ought to go downstairs and tell him. You think he ever fucked his little wifey here? Or maybe someone after she died? Maybe he wanted to fuck some of us here?”

“No,” he said harshly, staring at the bed curtains of pale green brocade with a fresh surge of hatred. “He only ever liked fucking people over.” Snow had never desired any of them—only what use he could make of them to help secure more power. She laughed again and fastened her teeth in his shoulder, urging him on once more.

She barely looked at him. As was, it was fierce and angry, fast and almost more like wrestling than fucking. He had a distant thought that for some reason she was scared of being pinned down, but couldn’t seem to grasp it enough to fully realize it, and it seemed like she was angry rather than frightened, and they were rolling over and over again often enough in that constant war for dominance and control that it didn’t matter anyway. They used each other to prove something to Coriolanus Snow and right in that moment, indulging that mutual desire for proving a point felt like a sweet vengeance.

That lasted about as long as it took him to stumble back to his room, when the sorrow descended again. They were all still dead and he was still a worthless wreck. He broke a chair as he tripped over it, then grabbed a bottle hidden in the cabinet of the nightstand and started in on it as the ghosts came closer, the only ones who would stay and keep him company, and whispered all their knowledge of his guilt. So the blackness of oblivion was a blessed release.

Of course, he couldn’t even have that peace, because Katniss came along. Glaring up blearily at her, he loathed her right then. Little brat, she made her contempt clear as she threw water on him like a dog that wouldn’t behave. Wouldn’t think to wait for him to wake up because of course her stupid melodramatic teenaged problems always were so urgent, and of course Haymitch had no right to any time or space of his own, she thought she owned him. _Fuck off, girl, I’m not here just to be your little advice-whore_ , he almost snarled at her, _so leave me alone tonight. I’m busy dealing with my own shit._

“What is it, sweetheart? More boy trouble?” he drawled instead, instinctively covering the nearly incandescent rage with the mask of insolent amusement. Couldn’t let people see the violent bastard within him.

The stricken look on her face, like he’d slapped her, punctured through the liquor and the grief and the rage, and the current reality came rushing back to him—Prim, Peeta, all of it. She turned and ran, and as he tried to take it back with a “OK, not funny, not funny,” yelling for her to come back, he knew she wouldn’t, and as he tried to follow her and ended up halfway to the door before the world wobbled sideways and he landed on the carpet, he knew miserably that he couldn’t catch her and try to fix it. He couldn’t fix anything.

~~~~~~~~~~

She’d gone down to the meeting in a bad mood, and Enobaria sitting there, smug as anything, like she actually fucking belonged, set off her temper even more. If any other Career’s ass could be in that chair, Finnick deserved it, not some Two bitch who’d eagerly suck any Capitolite’s cock and probably thank them, all teary-eyed, for the honor.

It was everything, really. Enobaria sitting there like a festering tumor. Annie, without Finnick. Katniss’ dead sister and Peeta’s screams and Haymitch’s brokenness and everything, everything that had been taken from her.

But it was that last conversation with Snow that lodged in her brain like a sliver of glass, sharp and bright and terrible. _I always admired your sheer force of will, Miss Mason, even as it made things very difficult when you wouldn’t do what was best for all. I never could quite bring you to heel as I could Mister Abernathy._

_Yeah, you trained him so well he planned a whole rebellion behind your back and brought you down. The girl was just the face. The war happened even while she was flipping out because you had Peeta. Because Haymitch was one of the ones planning it all along, and you didn’t have a fucking clue, because you thought you had him on a leash._

_And what does that make you, my dear? Simply the one they left behind. The one I doubt they would have exerted themselves to rescue, had Mister Mellark and Miss Cresta not been there with their loved ones demanding their safe return. And for what did you risk it all? What reward have you found in victory, for all your suffering? It seems you’re worse off than ever. I can see that you’re quite high on morphling. We finally broke you, my dear Miss Mason._

Someone had to pay, and it couldn’t be Snow, because that entitled bitch Katniss had claimed the right to kill him, and as usual, everyone clamored to give the princess what she wanted. As if only she had ever suffered. Snow’s casual parting cruelty clung to her, and so she wanted to see him suffer, to lose everything as she had. So when Peeta tried to play the moral crusader and act horrified at the idea of another Games, she scoffed. “Why not? It seems very fair to me. Snow even has a granddaughter. I vote yes.” 

Later that day, with the morphling wearing off and having seen the whole shitshow with Coin’s assassination, Haymitch’s mumbled explanations that it must have been Coin all along and he’d only realized it at the last moment with Katniss’ words during the vote, she felt sick. Snow was dead. Coin was dead. What the hell had she done, voting to murder a little girl? Being no better than Snow, taking vengeance on kin simply because she couldn’t get to him. Maybe Snow was right. They’d broken her, and she’d finally become a monster.

It was all too easy to reach for that blue glass bottle again and the syringe, and slip into a world where it all went away.

So nothing mattered. Not how Haymitch half-killed himself fighting for Katniss, and how he barely spoke to her for weeks and weeks. It didn’t matter. She never would have come first for him anyway, not so long as either of those kids lived. Wasn’t like she had any claim on him aside from friendship and two nights of desperation fucking anyway. And she’d probably sacrificed him as her one ally by acting like that at the vote, hadn’t she? He and Katniss had only voted “yes” as a ploy. Which left her in league with Enobaria alone. Alone--always alone. By this point it felt like she'd always been alone, like the memories of her mom and dad and Bern and Heike were the hallucinations. Though at least the memories were still there. Some things weren't. The electricity messed with her head, left some holes in her memory and it meant she struggled harder sometimes to remember things clearly. She never knew exactly what had been lost until someone mentioned something, looking at her like she ought to know, and she fumbled to catch up. Of course she hadn't lost the horrible memories, though it troubled her to wonder if she wouldn't trade the good memories of her family if it meant forgetting them entirely, and if she could throw everything about the Capitol in there too. It seemed to be more facts and knowledge rather than personal memories. At least the morphling let the memories slip away for a little while.

The weeks slipped by in a daze. She barely left her room. But Haymitch caught up to her one day downstairs, when she’d sneaked out to get some coffee. “How’s it going?” she said awkwardly.

“Trial’s ending tomorrow. We all had a nice little chat last night--me, Plutarch, Brocade Paylor, and the lawyers.”

She nodded, arms crossed over her chest, feeling cold, realizing she wore only a grubby t-shirt and jeans. How long since she’d changed clothes or bathed? She cringed to think how much she must smell. He didn’t react, though. “And?”

“Good, I think,” he said with a sigh, stretching out his back as if now, when forced to pause, he could finally notice his aches. “We got Kincaid--Thirteen's prosecutor--to agree to accept an insanity defense.”

“Has she really gone nuts, or did you finally get her to shut up and listen to you and play along?”

“She’s been in a cell for weeks doped up, nearly catatonic,” he said, a strange expression crossing his face as he looked at her. “They wouldn’t let her testify.”

“Great,” she said flatly. Something stirred within her. She’d been in that room all these weeks too, doped to the gills, and all he cared about was Katniss, and rescuing her once again. Snow was right. They wouldn’t have mounted a rescue if it was only her as a captive. She’d been abandoned then, and never really taken back, and this proved it all the more. “Haven’t you done enough nearly killing yourself over and over just to keep her alive, getting her out of the messes she gets into with her own stupidity, and the people she gets hurt by it? She’s _an ordinary girl_ you managed to make look good on camera. About time she grows the hell up and learns to take her own consequences like the rest of us rather than everyone making her think she’s so fucking special and constantly sheltering her.”

The steely, cold way he looked at her wrenched something with her, and he turned and walked away without another word. She watched him go, wanting to yell something after him, tell him to wait, but she couldn’t think how to take it back. “I’m sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t sure he heard it, because she thought he paused for a moment, but he didn’t turn back to her. She looked away, feeling even more sick. Never mind the coffee; she needed more morphling.

~~~~~~~~~~

After he made Katniss eat a sandwich, seeing the hollowness of her cheeks, and put her to bed, he couldn’t help it. He started gathering up all the liquor he could find on the hovercraft, hating himself as he did it. But the thought of going back to Twelve, with the two of them as the only living things there, filled him with nothing but dread.

He couldn’t look after her like she needed, wasn’t like he could even be trusted to look after himself. Dead sister, boyfriend in the hospital, abandoned by her mother—it reminded him too damn much of himself with losing brother, girlfriend, and mother all together. The face looking back at him, bewildered and lost with dull and empty eyes, might as well have been a feminine version of his own youthful self. 

She’d lost everything. She couldn’t end up like him. But he didn’t know how the hell to stop it. And even as he told himself he was just stockpiling the liquor in case, that he’d try to avoid it, he knew the moment he was back in that empty house alone, he’d want to drink. Johanna was right, in a way, he’d burned himself out over and over for Katniss, for a girl who didn’t even like him. But he couldn’t do anything else, and now he had nothing at all left to give.

Fuck, he wished he’d have been sober and clear-minded enough the night before Snow’s execution to listen to the girl. It was only the next day, when she said, For Prim, that he clued in to something going awry. Prim Everdeen would never have voted for the Games. He thought he’d finally figured it out—it was Coin all along, and so he went along with her, saying he was with the Mockingjay. Not Katniss herself. She was just playing Coin’s expected role and so would he. They were buying time, that was all, and he was all ready to talk to her after the execution, start making plans.

But obviously the girl didn’t trust him enough then to believe he’d help her handle it, so she jumped the gun and assassinated Coin. Why would she trust him now?

“Well, see you tomorrow,” he said, hoisting his bag as they parted ways on the Victors’ Village green.

Her whispered, “I doubt it,” struck deep. No, she didn’t trust him at all, though he couldn’t blame her. He watched her go. Their footprints in the shin-deep snow were the only sign of any living thing in Twelve. He looked at his dark house and cringed, because they had no electricity yet—the firebombs took down the whole grid. He knew the feeble glow of candlelight wouldn’t be enough to banish the darkness and all its monsters. So the clink of the bottles against each other as he trudged towards his front door was all the more reassuring.

He did his best. He rationed the alcohol because he was all she had. When he found her the next day lying there in her bed like a dead person, not moving and not responding, it was only the fact that she was still breathing that told him she was alive.

Two days later, much to his relief, Sae Vickers came back, and while Katniss didn’t exactly come to life, at least she let Sae feed her and the like, though she wouldn't allow a bath just yet. She hadn’t even allowed him that, much as he’d tried. He still checked in daily, but it was obvious his being there did nothing for her. So he went home and the bottles were still there in a neat row on his counter to keep him company. Best way possible to wash away yet another guilty failure.

She allowed herself to survive, if not to live. He didn’t know how to help teach her that. He’d made a business out of just surviving. Best thing possible was to leave her care to someone Katniss trusted, and to pray that the boy eventually came back.

He couldn’t help her, and she wouldn’t care if he drank his days away. Johanna never answered the phone when he slipped over to Peeta’s to call, and Annie had her own problems, so he wouldn’t pester her. He heard from Peeta occasionally, hearing the life coming back into his voice, the promises that he’d soon be ready to come back to Twelve. He wouldn’t tell Katniss and get her hopes up, in case they were crushed. But every time he hung up the phone, somehow he wanted to drink even more.

~~~~~~~~~~

The phone rang. She answered, if for no other reason than to make it shut up so she could have peace and quiet again. “Yeah?”

“Johanna.” It was the first she’d heard from Haymitch since that day in the hallway in the Capitol, nearly a month and a half ago now. She’d slipped away to Seven before they went to Twelve. No point in awkward goodbyes.

“Yeah, it’s me.” She clutched the phone in her hand. His was the first voice she’d heard in days.

“Haven’t caught you lately when I’ve called. How are you?”

“Oh, outstanding, me and the hubby are expecting triplets.” She barely left the house, except to buy a few supplies when she needed it, and to pick up her regular morphling delivery. She didn’t talk to anyone, well aware they didn’t want to talk to her. It was like before, except even worse, because that defensive wall of anger and not giving a fuck had crumbled, broken to bits. At least before, she felt like they saw her, even if they didn’t like her. These days, she felt more like a ghost, a pathetic, unnoticed shred of her former self. “You?”

Something warmed in his voice, and she breathed a sigh of relief to hear it. “Adopted a half-dozen orphaned kittens. Got a dozen ladies all competing for my love.”

“You old softie.”

The old banter was back, and with it, she understood that he’d apparently forgiven her for what she’d said about Katniss. Even now, she couldn’t claim it was all entirely untrue. Katniss was oblivious to how lucky she was, and too many people bent over backwards for her who wouldn’t lift a finger for others in need. But Haymitch was no hanger-on, merely trying to hitch himself to the Mockingjay. He’d been there for her from the start. Katniss was his tribute. He’d saved her life, and unlike with her and Cedrus and Blight, obviously there was a bond there. She’d said true things, but lousy ones all the same. “Beetee’s dead,” he said quietly. 

She stared out the window, not really seeing anything. “What?”

“I heard from Aurelius, the shrink. Beetee ate a nightlock pill last week. Left a note saying he couldn’t live with the guilt after those parachute bombs. They said you didn’t answer the phone, so I figured I’d try to call.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t exactly liked the old Three man, weird as he was. He’d never really fit in with Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, and Haymitch either, and Enobaria sure as hell wouldn’t have time for him. But she suddenly felt cold at the news. Another victor dead, and one who couldn’t take the burden of it all. It felt too familiar, and the idea was there now and couldn’t be erased. She could call it quits. It wasn’t like anyone would really care. But something about that still scared the hell out of her. 

He must have noticed her prolonged silence. “You...OK?”

She licked her lips, mouth suddenly feeling dry. “I get by well enough,” she lied. “You?”

“Same.” There was a long pause. She clutched the phone tightly, trying to think of the right thing to say to him, something that didn’t sound bitchy or pathetic or trite. It didn’t come to her, and it wasn’t only the fog of morphling to blame.

“Good hearing from you.” She meant it. If there was one person out there she’d actually care to talk to anymore, it was him. And hearing that they were OK, that he hadn’t cut her off after Katniss’ trial, was a small spark of relief.

“Good to talk to you.” She hung up the phone and went and on the bay window seat, looking out at the snow-covered ground, trying to feel anything at all except tired and oddly crushed. The old Johanna would have thought Beetee was weak. Now—maybe there was a certain dignity to choosing his end. More than the Capitol ever would have given any of them. Maybe Beetee had been the smart one, in more than just building things.

~~~~~~~~~~

Haymitch cleared his throat and said, “Aylish Brookstone,” and watched as Peeta inscribed the letters in stark black ink, neat artist’s calligraphy above the picture of a sweet-faced Seam girl. Whatever few pictures the Brookstones would have had burned along with them during the firebombing, so this picture was one caught at her Games interview, all dolled and tarted up in makeup and clothing too old for fifteen. But despite that, and despite the terror she must have felt, knowing the sponsors didn’t give a shit about a girl from Twelve, she’d still had such poise, such smarts, he’d had to admire her, and dare to have a faint glimmer of hope for the first time in years. Tried her heart out in training, pestered him for advice and strategy rather than just giving in. He’d gone into the arena that bad off, or worse. She’d lasted ten days. Another of those years that were bad luck breaks where if she’d lasted just a little longer, started to catch a few more sponsors’ eyes, it might have been her rather than Eleven’s Rice Lee who came home.

“She was fifteen, Aylish. She lasted ten days in there.” _She told me she’d never been kissed and she damn well aimed to survive long enough for that._ He didn’t talk about all that, though. It was too private, and they were good kids, Katniss and Peeta, but what could they really care about the details of the last days of a girl they’d never known? Some kind of fucked-up atonement for surviving when Aylish hadn’t? 

“Longer than most,” Peeta murmured.

“Yes.” Right then he wanted a drink. Another two and a half years of Games tributes told for this silly book that nobody would ever read, and almost all their families had died in the firebombing anyway. Entire names wiped from existence, and nobody to mourn at the Capitol-issued white markers in the tribute cemetery. _We remember._ Wasn’t it enough that he could never forget them, without being obliged to spew it all forth, a pale ghost of reality for everyone else to cluck their tongues over and sigh sadly?

But the girl obviously needed the book to deal with her dead, so he cooperated. He sat and told them old Hunger Games tales, not at all surprised that the details of forty-six dead children were etched into his brain sharp as ever. He sat there day by day with the two he’d managed to save, grateful that at least in the end he’d been granted that much. Though wasn’t like he had much point right now. He couldn’t be the one to bring her back after Prim’s death, drowned as he was long ago in grief and despair, couldn’t tell anyone how to start to pull out of it. He’d seen then soon enough after they got back and she went virtually catatonic. She’d needed Peeta to come back and so he had. He could see they’d started to heal the breach and come closer together again. 

Why he ought to live even now, useless and unwanted to the last, when so many others hadn’t still puzzled him. Cecelia, with Linsey, Lacey, and Lowell waiting for her back home, her head dropping to the sand and dyeing it bright red from a brutally efficient stroke of Brutus’ sword. Chantilly and Niello, both dead somewhere in the Detention Center, tortured to death or abruptly executed, and who knew what had happened to Citrine and Sardonyx, two more children likely lost in the huge pile of orphans left from this war? Finnick, with a wife at last and a child that he’d likely never known about, killed in the Capitol that had so long blighted his life. So many men and women in Twelve with lives to live, hopes and dreams cut short as they screamed out their last in a firestorm—he’d seen some of the bodies still before the clean-up crews arrived, an unidentifiable mass of scorched bones and burned flesh, but obviously huddled together, clutching each other tight.

 _If I could trade my life…_ How often had he had that thought? But he couldn’t, and of course, nobody had ever said that life was fair. 

The dusk shadows were falling and lengthening across Aylish’s page as they finished it, and of course, no electricity back just yet, so it was time to put the book away. Candlelight wouldn’t do. He stood, needing to get away and be alone again, lost in the whirl of his thoughts about all the dead. “G’night,” he told them, not wanting to make a big deal of it.

“We’re making stew tonight, if you’re…” Yeah, that was Peeta, always trying to invite him to dinner. Sometimes he even felt like it, and sometimes it was even a good evening with them, but not tonight. Katniss yanked on Peeta’s right sleeve, giving him a dark glare of warning, and the boy abruptly shut up. Haymitch didn’t take it personally. Maybe she didn’t much want him there, but she also appreciated that he didn’t much want to be there tonight. It was a nicely unspoken understanding they still had at times.

“Nah, got my own dinner,” he said, trying to not sound sarcastic about it. After all, he’d read in a book somewhere that in bygone days, dirt-poor laborers in some cultures drank potent beer and considered it a full meal. So white liquor ought to count for the same, right?

~~~~~~~~~~

She woke up from a dream of tracker jackers buzzing angrily, heart pounding wildly, before she recognized that the buzzing sound was actually the ringing phone in the kitchen. No question of who it was. Only one person called her regularly, period. What a shock. But that meant it must be…Wednesday. When had she sat down in that chair and injected the morphling? Yesterday? Monday, even? Did it really matter? She got to her feet swaying unsteadily, catching herself for a moment on the arm of the chair, head pounding behind her sinuses in the way that told her she was dehydrated—that and her mouth feeling like it was full of sawdust.

She wouldn’t be lucky enough that Aurelius would give up and go away. Even if she didn’t make it to the phone in time, he’d call back again in ten minutes, until she answered. Picking up the receiver, she put it to her ear, holding in between her ear and her shoulder. “Still not dead, still crazy,” she gave him her usual greeting.

“It’s good to hear your voice, Johanna,” he said. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Yeah, like he really gave a shit. Though after they found Beetee dead, apparently the fact of only six victors being left alive meant they were now of paramount concern. Like some exotic fucking species on the brink of extinction. _Save the victors,_ she thought with a snort. Maybe Paylor’s government would start a breeding program. She’d let Katniss and Peeta handle preserving victor bloodlines, thanks very much, and Annie and Finnick’s kid too. 

“You expected me to off myself?” she said coolly.

“Have you spoken to Katniss, Peeta, or Haymitch lately?”

She poured a glass of tepid water from the pitcher on the counter and drank it down in three quick swallows, already reaching to pour another. “Not like we hold nightly gossip circle, Doc. And Kittycat and the drunk ripped the phones out of their houses, you hadn’t noticed that?”

“And Peeta?”

 _Like he wants to be reminded of the worst fucking months of his life where we were listening to each other get tortured in the next cell over._ She still woke up sometimes with the boy’s raw, ragged screams ringing in her ears. “Figured he’s got them right there,” she said casually. “He called me, what, a month ago? Six weeks?” They’d had a nicely awkward ten minute conversation. The fact she’d been dreamily swimming through a fresh dose of morphling at the time and couldn’t hold a rational thought to save her life probably hadn’t helped things, although it wasn’t like they held deep philosophical talks when he happened to call while she was off the needle. 

“Peeta hasn’t answered his phone for a week now.”

She let out a bark of laughter at that. “Oh, and you think they all chewed on some nightlock? Nah. Bet you he’s too busy screwing Katniss to have gone home at all. Good for him. About time.”

“Still,” Aurelius said, that nasal Thirteen voice making her itch to hit something, “I’d like to ascertain that for certain. But I can’t leave the Capitol right now.”

“Very busy and important, I know,” she deadpanned.

“Besides, it would be best for them to see a friendly face. So I’d like for you to go to District Twelve and see how they’re doing?”

She glanced around the kitchen, seeing the mess. Pots and dishes in the sink that she hadn’t bothered to clean from the rare occasions she felt like eating. Spatters on the stove, the counter, and the floor that she hadn’t felt like scrubbing, and clutter all over the counter besides. The entire house was going to hell. She was going to hell, for all that. Had she washed herself at all in the last few days? Not like she had anyone to impress. She felt a flicker of irritation and something like shame, a moment of the person she’d been, who’d be disgusted at this life. A filthy junkie in a filthy house—well, that Johanna hadn’t known anything about being taken apart, tortured, broken to pieces and utterly abandoned. She’d been scarred before by the Games and the whoring and her murdered family, and thought it couldn’t get worse than that, stupid of her. Haymitch was proof that it could always get worse, and she’d become just as bad as him, maybe even worse. A flicker of alarm and something like shame burned within her--maybe a change of scenery might do something. If nothing else, it couldn’t hurt to force herself out of the house for a week or two. Go see the few people who might actually understand what it was like, rather than cloister herself away from people too normal, too optimistic, for her to bear. “I’m sure I can make some time in my schedule,” she told him tiredly. Besides, she could always hope Aurelius might even leave her alone for a few weeks if she jumped through this hoop.


	2. Chapter 2

Johanna didn't say much as she followed the train’s porters with their cart of crates into the center of what had once been District Twelve. She noticed one was labeled “BLACK EAGLE” and “FRAGILE” and “FLAMMABLE” in bold red capital letters. Black Eagle whiskey sent from District One: three guesses who that one went to, and they all had the initials H and A. Rucksack slung over her shoulders with a few changes of clothes and close to a month’s supply of morphling--she didn't plan to be here past the next train back in two weeks, but best to be on the safe side in case the pain was particularly bad some days--she surveyed what she guessed had once been the square, to judge from the heap of jumbled stone that looked impressive enough that it must have been the Justice Building.

District Twelve, from her brief visit on her victory tour nine and a half years ago now, hadn't registered all that much. The first stop on the Tour, she’d been so nervous and panicked, worrying about another relapse of the dark terror she’d experienced after her reaping, that she hadn’t looked around the place all that much, all her energy and will focused on trying to stay centered and sane. The asshole broadcasters took that distraction and sold it as her being all haughty and unconcerned with the dead kids, which just played into their neat little “vicious sly bitch” narrative, smooth as soft butter on hot toast. By the time she hit Eight, the country probably thought she was worse than any Career. At least they were expected to be soulless Capitol sellouts who gloried in death. Maybe that was why they’d hated her. They’d expected more than what the Capitol told them she was. They’d wanted another Katniss Everdeen, all supposed selflessness and romance and sacrifice. Never mind Katniss’ narrative was as much bullshit as Johanna’s had been. People saw what the Capitol wanted them to see and that was that. 

But even back in the winter of 66, Twelve hadn’t been all that much to shout home about to begin. Dark, grey, depressing; everything covered with coal dust where it wasn’t buried in sooty snow. She'd looked out from the stage into a sea of tired and hopeless faces with exhausted grey eyes that she saw the next summer and beyond were a keen match for their only living victor's. Now there wasn't even that much there. Emptiness and the eerie sense of an apocalypse, empty of life, a monument to death and destruction. Truer than the old arenas, turned into tourist carnivals for Capitolites, had ever been. At least in the June heat, the reek of death and rot wasn't there, and she didn't see carrion birds and other scavengers picking through the wreckage for the carcasses. Presumably anything that could have rotted got most of that business done last summer and autumn. Either that or they were so deeply buried the scent of decay hadn't gotten out into the open.

Despite the winter snows and spring rains since, the cobbles underfoot had a dark, greasy patina to them, and they were cracked from the intense heat of the firebombing. Nothing stood except the blackened rubble piles, steel lampposts twisted and deformed by the fires, and a few crooked partial walls, crumbling slowly in the elements. 

Oddly, it seemed to suit, in a way that the winter town didn't. They were scarred in Seven, still mourning their dead and rebuilding some places, but life went on while she stood there unmoved by it, apart from it, like a rock stuck in the middle of a river as the waters flowed on by her. This place, dead and razed with its soul all violently ripped out in a massive scream, felt like an outer reflection of herself. There would be no expectations here, no pretensions. Not a living thing there right there except her, the few workers unloading some supplies who'd hurry to escape the wasteland on the train--and then there was the man she finally spied, lurking in the shadows of the Justice Building ruins.

Tightening down the straps of her rucksack again, brushing her hair out of her eyes, she headed over his way, into the cooling shadows out of the summer heat, feeling the trickle of sweat run down her back. She never wore short sleeves anymore, not with the scars still fading, and especially not with the marks now on her elbows and arms. "Hey, old man, bet you thought you'd seen the last of me," she told him with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, striving to put on that _Fuck you, just fine, don't bother me_ air. He'd seen too much of her back in Thirteen and in the Capitol after the war ended. She wasn't going to be that vulnerable again.

He looked like shit. Granted, he'd looked like shit in the Capitol too, drinking again and brooding too much over all the dead, but at least there had still been some kind of energy to him once Katniss got herself arrested and he had some new fight to throw himself into for a while. That had guttered out now. He could act well enough to make a lack of animation look good, languid and lazy and dangerous in the way of a forest cat lying in wait--she'd seen that, and could only imagine that in earlier years, when he was in his prime at being sold off, he'd been even better at it. But this wasn't like that. He carried himself with the air of having nothing left, of giving a single damn about anything being too much to bear. Unshaven chin, rumpled hair and wrinkled clothes, bloodshot eyes, that little slump and roll of the shoulders. He looked the way he had towards the end of each Games the last few years before Katniss and Peeta: like merely enduring the suffering of each day was almost too much to withstand. The Capitol’s merciless efforts had kept him tidy for the cameras when they needed, but once he was out of the Games and no longer of interest, his looks started to rapidly match the deadness in his eyes. 

She'd judged him for it back then with the stupid condescension of someone who couldn't imagine how deep the pit got and how much drowning in shit could happen. She knew far better now, and in a strange way, it comforted her to see him. Familiar old Haymitch, who even at his worst was good for that sort of offhanded, unspoken support and lack of judgment. And besides, it meant she wasn't the only one who'd gone to pieces after they won the war. Hurray for the rebel victory and a brave new world, or something. "'Lo, Johanna," he answered, and she was surprised to see a little half-smile on his lips for a moment. "Got the itch to come see us in our lovely home district," he nodded to the rubble, though she noticed he avoided staring at it, "or something else drawing you here?"

"Well, I sure as hell wasn't gonna go visit Enobaria," she said, stretching her arms out and rolling her shoulders back. As far as Johanna was concerned, Enobaria couldn't die soon enough. Though she couldn't muster enough rage or resolve to go do the job herself, admittedly. So long as the fang-toothed bitch kept herself in Two and off the television, Johanna would pretend she didn’t exist. 

"I'd sooner recommend you seeing Annie," he said dryly. "I hear the ocean's very pretty this time of year."

"Right," she said with a snort of derisive amusement, "I should go see the poor grieving widow and her screaming newborn." She should have called Annie, after Aurelius told her that the kid had arrived, and weeks early to boot. But not like she'd picked up the phone in response after that. There had been the times back in Thirteen after Star Squad left that she'd felt like Annie had become actually a friend rather than just a shadowy figure Finnick loved and was fucking and who got to stay safely in Four away from all the pain of the Games and the degradation. But then Annie had gone to Four and Johanna had gone to Seven, and that was that. Besides, what words of comfort could she possibly say? Offer to have Annie come to Seven with her? What perspective did she have on losing a husband, taking care of a new baby? Her own lack of anything and anyone who gave a shit enough to ever put her first, let alone loved her enough to want to make a life with her, would only rip open the edges of her own emptiness again. Not like Annie needed that right now. The best favor Johanna could do her, as a friend, was to stay the hell away from her. 

"At least the kid--Dylan--he doesn't look like Finn," he said. How the hell did he know? "Annie sent us a picture." His hand rose, flicked a forefinger at his tangled dark mane. It had grown out completely from the severe Thirteen military cut now, shaggy jaw-length waves once again. "Black hair."

She raised an eyebrow. "You trying to tell me something here?" She wasn't sure why she said it. Obvious where the black hair came from, a perfect match to Annie's sleek dark mane, but maybe it was just to get a rise out of him if possible. It had always been like that. Seeing him so lackluster had always made her prod him all the harder until she got a reaction. Apparently even with going to shit herself, the instinct was still there.

He let out a bark of derisive laughter. "Please. I've done some lousy things, but screwing my friend's wife ain't on the list. Besides, you know she only had eyes for him." He cocked his head aside slightly, regarded her and suddenly there was a hint of something in those tired eyes, a hawkish intensity and she realized with some excitement that he’d taken the bait. "And you also know exactly where I was the night we heard about Star Squad. Wasn't with Annie."

What, was he trying to make her blush or flinch? She remembered all right, how it had been almost a little too rough, but that had actually been good. Good to feel alive, good to feel even a meaningless physical pleasure rather than the ghosts of old pain. "Oh," she said, flashing him her most cutting smile, sharp and dismissive, "did you think that little interlude got me fixated on you? Or maybe you've been fantasizing about how sweet and romantic that fuck in Snow's bed was, drunk and pissed off as we were.” Celebrating their supposed _victory_ with liquor and angry sex to cover the bitter taste of ashes, of nothing really won because even the few things that had mattered at arms’ length got destroyed. “And now I'm here to tell you I love you, can't live without you? Grow up, old man. We screwed each other because reality sucked and you finally let yourself admit that a good fucking’s much better than feeling nothing. Didn't mean a damn thing." Nothing except a few hours of feeling something besides rage or emptiness or pain. That was justification enough. It always had been, because there was never any other reason.

His eyebrows rose, though his expression was anything but surprised, mouth a tight-lipped slash of cynical amusement. “Noted. Thanks for the clarification, darlin’, had it all muddled in my head these last months. I mean, those nights were so romantic they got me so damn tongue-tied I couldn’t even bear to pick up the phone and call you to express my undying love.”

She laughed at that, but lightly, not mockingly, enjoying the back-and-forth between them, like a jolt of electricity--no, not that, never that again. Like a burst of fresh energy, running through her veins and making her feel a little more alive, a little challenged to keep up with him. He could be liquor sodden enough to practically pour out of a chair in a boneless heap, and yet that quick, sharp tongue always worked. “Who could resist this place?” She nodded towards the desolate heaps of rubble. “Nice secluded lovers’ paradise. I imagine it’s doing wonders for our dear Mockingjay and her beloved baker, mm?”

He clapped his hands together, smiling wryly, shaking his head slightly to let her know that she’d crossed a line there by talking about the kids. They’d always been his soft spot. “So really, who sent you?”

No point beating around the bush. “Aurelius. Complaining you folks haven’t answered the phone in a while.”

“They’ve been busy.”

“Oh, _busy_?” she imitated his Twelve twang emphatically, drawing quotation marks in the air with her fingers for emphasis. “Let’s hope they’re getting some contraception in their train orders, because, I mean, really…” Though they were eighteen now. Old enough that without the Games, they might well have married, especially since Twelve always seemed to catch them younger even than Seven. But the thought of bringing a kid into this barren, broken wasteland of a district made something turn uncomfortably in her gut. They’d exiled Katniss here because they wanted her out of sight, so people would eventually quit asking the embarrassing questions. It wasn’t a place to live. It was a place to die. The only choice was whether it would be slowly or abruptly.

“Ah, they’re not sleeping together,” he said distractedly, shaking his head. “Yet,” he added, with another of those quick, dry smirks. “But they go out all day together, wander back in time for dinner. I don’t ask where. Doubt it’s the woods, Peeta’s useless out there, and Katniss ain’t been bringing back game or the like. But it’s best they get the hell out of the house anyway.”

Better that way, she acknowledged with a curious pang in her chest. Better that they end up nothing like Haymitch, or her, if there was anything left of them to shore up and patch and rebuild, rather than crumbled ruins. “Anyway,” he went on, eyes turning briefly to the cart rumbling its way up the hill towards the Victors’ Village and then flicking immediately back over to her, “suppose you’re here until the next train, huh?” He shrugged swiftly. “Peeta’ll be glad to see you.”

“Aw, not Katniss?” she asked, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Hell, is she ever happen to see anyone?” he answered her with a faint chuckle, pushing off from the heap of stone and heading up towards the path himself. “You can put up at my place. Got spare rooms, of course, and probably better that we both leave them be while they keep figuring things out. You’ll have to call Aurelius from Peeta’s house and let him know we’re not all dead.” He grunted in amusement. “Nah. I’ll make the boy call him.”

At least that was figured out. She followed him, already sweating in the summer heat, and wanting nothing more than to get inside, take off her long-sleeved shirt and drink some water, and get another dose of morphling in her, because she’d kept off it for the whole train ride and now could feel the itching beneath her skin, the aches and fatigue, and the dark monster lurking at the edge of her mind, ready to swallow her up in the nightmares again. 

Victors’ Village had the same setup as Victors’ Glade back home--the same circle, the same sequence of colors repeated in twin arcs starting from those closest to the stone wall and the tall, wrought iron gate: white, blue, yellow, green, cream, grey. It was disorienting for a moment to think about it and realize they’d go to the second house, the pale blue one with grey trim, and to see that the fourth house, the green one, had brownish trim rather than the crisp white she was used to from back home. “Peeta,” he said, nodding towards the green house. “Since they decided Katniss,” a thumb jerked towards the yellow house in between the blue and the green, “counted as the third victor and he was fourth. We usually end up eating there and all.” Johanna could imagine that Katniss’ mother and sister still had all their stuff in the house, and Katniss probably hadn’t touched it. No wonder she spent all her time at Peeta’s house, or wherever the hell the two of them disappeared to every day.

The white house on her left as they passed spoke of long, long years of neglect and emptiness. The only other Twelve victor before Haymitch--Nualla or Nuada or something like that--had won back in the single digits, as Johanna remembered, back around Buck’s Games, and then gone and killed herself a few years later. Couldn’t handle it, obviously. Long, long before Haymitch was even born, let alone got penned up in the Second Quell arena. Even at the worst, there had always been people in the Glade: Cedrus and Blight, and their stories about Buck, who’d died a few years before her own Games, and even long-dead Miller, from a few years after Cedrus. Always someone else there in Mentor Central, even if it was Blight who’d been unable to handle much when it came to suffering and dying kids, but at least it let her go get some regular sleep in a real bed, unlike Haymitch’s sleeping on a couch in the lounge, left utterly alone and partnerless.

The grass was overgrown as they walked the path towards Haymitch’s house, a thicket higher than her knees, more like the prairies of Ten than the neatly manicured lawns that the Capitol had insisted upon tending for its victors.

“Geese will probably be back around dinner,” Haymitch told her, sidestepping a patch of what looked like bird shit on the path. “They usually don’t fuss about people, though, so don’t worry that they’ll go after you.”

“Geese?” she asked, a little stupidly.

“They showed up a few months back in the spring,” he said with a shrug. “You’ve got northern geese in Seven too, I’d guess?” She nodded--the big grey-and-black birds and their seasonal migrations were as familiar to any Seven kid as the back of their hand. Fierce bastards, though, not worth the trouble to try to catch and eat. “Mated pair, I’d say. One’s got a crooked wing so they might be stuck here come fall, and the other’s scarred up a bit too. Guess they probably lost their eggs for this year too from whatever attacked them. They hang around, I feed ‘em, they wander in when they feel like it and wander off otherwise.”

Taking in a pair of wounded geese who’d recently lost their offspring, but not wanting to get too involved. Typical Haymitch move, she thought, not sure whether she was exasperated, amused, or both. “Couldn’t just get a dog, could you?”

“Ah, please. A dog? My record of keeping things alive that are totally depending on me for survival usually runs to a matter of hours, not years,” he said, tone jokingly light and nonchalant, but she could feel the dark, hatefully bitter edge to the words all the same.

Turning the well-worn brass doorknob, he pushed the front door open with a nudge of his shoulder. Nobody in the Glade bothered to lock their doors anyway, given that anyone invading a victor’s house would pay a heavy price. Besides, who would invade the Village anyway, given they were pretty much the only living souls here? “Sticks in summer, huh?” she noted, seeing he had to force it with some effort. The wood swelled in the summer heat, a basic principle any Seven child would have known before making a door. Especially in a place like this, where the humidity gathered thickly, like the ribbons of fog hiding the tops of the mountain ridges had crept down the slopes, coalesced, and pooled heavily down in the valley.

“Quality Capitol construction,” he said dryly. “It’s drafty in winter too, of course, when the door shrinks.”

Familiar, but slightly askew as it all was, the welcome chilly blast of air conditioning didn’t greet her as she stepped inside the house. The slightly sticky air followed, and she suppressed a groan at that, wanting nothing more than to rip off the shirt. Not like she could go jump in a cool shower, or even the pond in the middle of the Village--the very thought made a shudder work its way down her spine, terror flickering at the edges of her mind. “A/C’s out?” she asked. “Or just off?”

He turned and looked at her, brow furrowing in confusion. “Electricity’s been off ever since the firebombing, Johanna,” he said, obviously choosing his words with care. “No A/C, no lights.” He grinned that sarcastic smile. “The bright side to that is that there’s no television.” Given how much she’d rotted her brain with the treacly, optimistic bullshit put on the television by the post-Snow regime, sitting on the couch in a mindless haze, that actually sounded like a blessing. “The water pipes were deep enough in the ground to not be damaged, so at least we don’t have to haul water all the way from the woods. No water heater, though, so we have to heat up our water for dishes and baths. Had to get a wood-burning stove to cook.” He hesitated and added, voice going a bit softer, “Easier for us all to eat together, cook one meal.” He grumbled lowly. “Kids really need to be drinking more milk or something, but…no refrigerator. All non-perishables, or what we can keep for a few days in a cooler.” 

Recalling the crates she’d seen down in the ruined square, and a few sealed coolers, now it made sense. Not really any rougher than the life she’d lived as a child, when they’d only really had reliable electricity to the television during mandatory Capitol programming, but she’d gotten soft in the years since then, unconsciously expecting certain things from victor housing. Obviously they were roughing it here, and not complaining about it. “No worse than we had growing up, right?” she told him, shrugging dismissively. She smirked at him. “And don’t worry, you know I won’t need that much water for a bath.”

He gave her that amused little half-smile in return, and pointed up the stairs. “They set up the second room on the left as a guest room. Probably a bit dusty--been a year since Hazelle cleaned in there. But it’ll do.”

She nodded at that, heading up the stairs in a hurry, eager to get some privacy. “Gonna take a nap,” she lied. Although given how cheerfully dopey she felt for a while after the first hit of morphling, she might as well be sleeping. “Tell Peeta to call Aurelius to get him off all our asses, and let me know about dinner.” 

She could feel her hands starting to shake and the cold sweat starting to run down her temples, the churning in her gut, the weight of everything pressing in around her to the point where something stupid like the lack of air conditioning suddenly seemed worthy of a freak-out. Shutting the door behind her hastily, she didn’t even bother to check out the room beyond the glancing impression of a simple bed, nightstand, and dresser, slightly dusty, and faded blue paint on the walls, as she dropped the rucksack on the neatly tucked blanket. Crossing to the window and throwing open the blue-and-white striped curtains, she had to crank the window extra hard thanks to the swelling of the frame, but got it open, relieving some of the oven-like stuffiness of the room, hanging out the window and breathing the fresh air, reassuring herself there was a window and a door and an escape, and it was nothing like the sweaty, fetid air in that cinderblock box the Capitol had kept her in. But there was still no hint of a breeze coming in through the open window, and she felt hotter and hotter suddenly, so she ripped off her shirt hastily, almost tearing the buttons off, scratching fiercely at her sweaty, itchy skin. Turning, she dug in her rucksack for her supplies. That would make it all better.

~~~~~~~~~~

Peeta, being his usual self and all in a fuss over having a guest, insisted on knowing what Johanna wanted for dessert--vanilla cake with some of the precious fresh strawberries brought on the train, or chocolate? Biting his tongue to avoid telling the boy, _I really don’t think she gives a shit_ , seeing Katniss’ glower at him as if sensing he was about to give a glib, snarky reply, he sighed mentally. Wouldn’t hurt, in the end, and if it kept Peeta calm and happy to feel like he was making the extra effort, all to the good. Wasn’t like it was a pretty situation when the boy got agitated, although he did a damn good job controlling it with the relaxation techniques, excusing himself before he lost it, and the like. Far better than Haymitch staying off the bottle.

Unfortunately he couldn’t fake it by simply giving Peeta the answer, and as he cast back to Mentor Central and the table of treats always out for the mentors, he couldn’t recall what he’d seen Johanna reaching for on a regular basis. She had a sweet tooth, obviously, didn’t stick only to the savory stuff like cheese and spice biscuits, but he couldn’t recall if it was chocolate or vanilla or caramel or what. It seemed to him that she’d been somewhat omnivorous. Then again, he’d usually had slightly more weighty matters on his mind than Johanna’s preference in treats. 

So abandoning Peeta to his dinner plans, he headed back to his house, climbing the stairs and noticing the creak in the third one had gotten worse again. When he got to the room she’d taken, one of the guest rooms furnished by the Capitol and never used--he couldn’t have given her the rooms for his ma and Ash, with beds never slept in and boxes delivered and never even unpacked--he saw she’d left the door slightly ajar. Besides, she’d never been especially modest, so he knocked in a brief rap, pushing the door open and stepping inside.

In the years he’d known her, Johanna had usually defiantly carried a few extra pounds on an already-solid frame, and she’d probably been even a bit heavier going into the Quell. Not like he could judge her for stress eating after the card was read in April, with three months of absolute certainty that she’d be going back into the arena in July, and that nobody really gave a shit whether she made it out. 

She’d come out of the Detention Center half-starved, looking almost birdlike in how frail and skinny she was. She’d never fully gained back all the weight she’d lost, but by the time they’d captured the Capitol, she no longer looked like a scarecrow, skin stretched drum-taut over a sticklike frame of prominent bones. She’d dropped weight again. She wasn’t that frighteningly emaciated now as she’d been last September after her rescue, but he could see those wide cheekbones pressing through the flesh, and the way she wore long sleeves even in the late June heat told him she was cold, her body unable to easily sustain its own heat. But right now she had the shirt off and sat there in her plain white bra and jeans, grown-out autumn brown hair in her eyes, a syringe in hand a faded green bandana tied around her left biceps, raw red stripes on her arms and shoulders and chest that looked suspiciously like gouges scratched by her own nails. 

Then there was the stippled cluster of marks in both her elbows and forearms. They might almost have been bug bites, and they’d always made Max and Poppy cover up, as if everybody didn’t know about their addiction, but he’d seen Maribelle Undersee once, maybe ten years back, hiding out back behind a building in the merchie square right after a delivery of Capitol goods, panting and gasping as she rolled up her sleeve and stabbed the needle into her arm. He’d known her for a morphling addict, but that was the first he’d seen that same constellation of marks, far more extensive than Johanna’s, in fact, and even more visible on that fair skin than Johanna’s gold, even faded and ashen as it currently was. Maysilee’s blood had stood out so stark against that same milk-pale merchie skin, and the welling bead of blood on Maribelle’s arm as she drew out the needle with a sigh of relief after pushing the plunger had transfixed him for a moment with an odd horror that had nothing to do with morphling. But he’d recovered, and given that his backpack had been chock full of clinking bottles promising relief, he’d hardly been in a position to judge Maribelle for her own painkiller. She hadn’t even noticed him there as she sagged against the back of the Taylor’s tailor shop, head lolling back, eyes closed, and practically weeping in relief, so he’d slipped away.

Seeing him looking at the stippling of marks clustered in her elbow and forearm, now there was life in Johanna’s eyes. She reminded him of an angry wolf, eyes narrowed and snarling, as she leaped to her feet, not bothering to cross her arms over her breasts or anything, but slapping a hand over her elbow to cover the angry red marks. “You could fucking knock!”

He shrugged, suddenly awkward. “Do you think I didn’t know you were using?” The times he’d talked to her on the phone, she’d had that dreamy, happy, distant tone, unlike Johanna’s usual brash, sharp-tongued sass. Years around Maribelle, and Max and Poppy too, how could he not know what someone in a morphling daze sounded like? She obviously hadn’t been eating either, though she didn’t have the jaundiced tone to her skin yet from years of abuse, but her golden skin looked ashen and pale, almost like Beetee’s had naturally. Johanna never did anything by halves, but he hadn’t really had the reality of her using morphling smack him directly until right now. Although in his defense, he’d crawled deep into a bottle himself because he couldn’t even look after himself, let alone two kids, let alone worry about someone three districts over. He’d mustered enough juice to pull himself out of it, mostly, for that frantic year and a half between Katniss volunteering and taking her home again to a dead District Twelve. He had nothing left now. He simply couldn’t do it anymore. 

“Oh, really, are _you_ staging an intervention?” she scoffed, arms folded defensively over her chest. “Hypocrite.”

“If you want to use morphling, have at it.”

Another grumbling scoff answered him. “Gee, thanks for permission, boss.”

He could bicker with her about it, but this was one time it wouldn’t be an enjoyable, almost teasing banter. It would go in circles quickly, to no purpose. “Trust me, I’d be the last one to tell you off about it.” She couldn’t have failed to notice he was back on the bottle, and hard.

She looked at him, eyes wide now in astonishment for a moment before she caught herself. “Oh, just like that? No judgment? No inspirational speeches about how all I need is to rediscover my purpose? Lectures on how I owe it to all the poor dead people to not waste my life?”

He smiled at her, shaking his head. “It’s…I figure,” he said, carefully searching for the words, “we’ve earned the right to choose to go to hell if we want.” The Capitol had never given them that, even as it forced them over the edge, and told them they were terrible and weak for cracking under the pressure. The last thing he needed or wanted now was chipper do-gooders who didn’t understand the first fucking thing about his life trying to tell him he somehow owed it to the world or himself or whoever to get clean and sober and slog it out for another twenty or thirty miserable, pointless years. It was the best kind of respect he could give her: that she’d earned the right in her suffering to make her own choices. Beetee had, and he couldn’t fault the man for it. There was that dignity, and maybe whatever comfort she might take in knowing she wouldn’t go there alone.

She huffed out another sigh, body relaxing, and her arms dropped to her sides. At least he couldn’t still see her ribs. “So what were you barging in here about anyway?”

“Peeta. Insists on knowing whether you want chocolate or vanilla cake with dinner.”

She gave a diffident shrug. “Yeah, so...I don’t care.”

“Food doesn’t taste like much?” he guessed. Those hawkish brown eyes met his, and even slightly unfocused as they were, it was still disconcerting. “It doesn’t with the booze,” he admitted, oddly compelled to honesty. He would never have said it years ago, but back then she wouldn’t have given a shit about the small details of being a drunk. “I think drinking kills your sense of taste.” Katniss was a damn good cook, he was sure, and he could remember food tasting surprisingly good last year in those months of enforced sobriety before Reaping Day, but right now anything he put in his mouth might as well taste like eating classroom paste like hungry littles did at school sometimes. Or had, when Twelve existed. Feeling awkward at having admitted that, plus the specter of the dead district rising in his mind, he hurried on, “Or, what, you don’t like sweets anymore?”

She laughed, shaking her head sharply, messy spikes of hair falling in her eyes. “If anything that’s about all that tastes good. Guess being a junkie gives you a raging sweet tooth.”

Memory nudged at him of Max and Poppy packing away cake and cookies and the like, and the jokes about them having the appetite of sugar-happy five-year-olds. He tried to drag it back to somewhere lighter and cheerfully sarcastic by quipping, “Not like people would have claimed I ever had taste anyway.” That earned him a quick, almost reflexive smile from her.

“Tell him vanilla,” she said, reaching for her still-buttoned shirt and pulling it on over her head. Glancing at him, she rolled up the sleeves slowly, exposing the marks again. He shook his head slightly, catching her eyes. _No, I won’t tell._ So long as she was here in the house, she could run around naked for all he cared. He’d been made the butt of enough public judgment and censure that he’d never subject her to that. “I’m gonna catch a nap before dinner. Long train ride.”

Nodding at that, he closed the door behind him as he went, making sure it fully shut this time.

~~~~~~~~~~

By the time she woke up again, the warm sense of painlessness still thrummed through her veins, but the worst hit of the morphling passed. No fuzzy-headed feeling, like viewing the world through the thick, distorted glass of a funhouse, no sense that that everything moved and spoke at half speed.

Pulling on her shoes again, she headed down the stairs, hearing Haymitch’s footsteps in the kitchen. There was a sense, heading through the parlor to the kitchen, of an unnerving deja vu. The same blueprint, but the wood here was darker than the reddish maple back home, a deep mahogany, and the walls were green rather than blue, and what looked like odd mottling actually was faded areas, bleached by wear and by sunlight. Of course: he’d lived here twenty-six years, whereas her house had only ten years of wear on it now. Although she would have thought in that span of time he’d have repainted at least once.

The kitchen showed it even more, with the yellow walls faded to ivory, and the white-and-yellow gingham curtains with the embroidered hem age-yellowed in some spots and rendered thin and sun-bleached in others. The cabinets and counter were still sturdy, but somewhat scratched with the years and never sanded and refinished. Everything about the house looked faded, tired. “I’m sure one of those Capitol ‘house rescue’ shows would say this place needs a woman’s touch” she quipped, though as ever, her mind and tongue beat her sensibilities and heart. The moment it dawned on her that it probably hadn’t been a sixteen-year-old Haymitch Abernathy that chose the colors, that just like she’d left it to her parents to make the empty shell into an actual home, it had probably been his mother to decorate.

The fact he couldn’t even muster a snarky response told her enough, as did the tight curl of his hand around the open bottle of Black Eagle resting on the counter, and how he threw back another swig of it. A third gone already, she noted. “She never even got to live here, did she,” she guessed. The closed doors upstairs, the parlor with its well-worn green couch but no personal touches, no mementoes, unlike her own parlor which stood frozen in time the way it had been when she came back from the 67th Games--her mom’s basket of half-mended socks, Heike’s half-finished book for class with a ration chit as a bookmark. Apparently Haymitch couldn’t bear to change things either, to let go that last bit of them, and the sight of it tugged on her own well of grief in a way that roused her anxiety. 

“No.” A single word, with a rusty and jagged edge to it, coming to her on a faint cloud of whiskey fumes. Another swig from the bottle, almost absent-minded and instinctive. “All three of ‘em died eleven days after Snow put that fucking crown on my head. Ma, Ash, Briar.” He set the bottle down gently on the counter, put the top back on, and wiped the back of his hand across his lips in one quick, thoughtless motion. “Let’s go to dinner. Don’t want to be late, or Katniss’ll never let us hear the end of it.”

She followed him on the path to Peeta’s house, the green one that reminded her of Blight’s, passing the shuttered windows of Katniss’ house and all its weight of the dead. Not that Peeta hadn’t lost his family too, but given what she’d heard him raving and screaming at his mom and dad and brothers, she could tell they hadn’t been close. _Fuck you, you wouldn’t even tell her to stop beating me! Your own son. And you two--cowards. Mutt! Katniss, she’s a mutt and a liar and she still would have saved her sister, and you were always glad when it was me and not you!_ She suppressed a shudder. “Did his family move with him?” She nodded to Peeta’s house.

“Yes,” he said grimly, and she could tell by the tight edge to his voice how much anger he suppressed about it as well, and that he knew what had gone on as well. “Enjoying a victor’s wealth, of course, flaunting all around town how proud they were of their baby boy, when it was really all about bragging when everyone knew how screwed up a family they were anyway. But they wouldn’t give up the bakery. Wouldn’t want people to think they’d got ‘above themselves’. So they all died there during the firebombing.” He paused for a moment, foot on the first step of the porch. “Funny thing, but that’s four dead folks I don’t feel much loss on, at least on my account.” He nodded to the house. “I don’t say it around him, only because he still grieves ‘em sometimes. They were awful, but they were his kin all the same.” He turned to her, grey eyes sharp despite the whiskey. “So if I were you, I wouldn’t insult them. It gets him upset.”

“You didn’t listen to him rambling and screeching for six weeks when they triggered his emotions and then pulled at them more to fuck him up even worse,” she told him dryly. “I’m probably more familiar with ‘upset Peeta’ than you, thanks.”

He inclined his head slightly and nodded, and she recognized the apology in it, and nodded in return as acknowledgment. “So it’s just you three, huh? How’d the hell did you and Kittycat make it through the winter?” She doubted Haymitch had been in much state to do anything, drunk and depressed as he’d been even when they’d said goodbye that last time, and Katniss had been a total wreck by the end of her trial. 

“Sae--she used to sell soup at the Hob, that was our trading post, I mean…” He broke off the disjoint ramble, and tried again. “Sae Vickers came back right after we got back. One of two dozen people who came back right away from Thirteen. She and her granddaughter were the only ones who stayed more than about a week. Twelve, we’re built for hardship, you know, but when there’s no food, no houses, nothing at all, and it’s the dead of winter…they all headed back to Thirteen. Katniss and me…” He fell silent. “Neither of us would have gotten through the winter,” he admitted quietly. “She stayed around until spring, helped us out a bit with the cooking and all, until Peeta coming back. I sent her to Three then. Sae’s granddaughter Pella--she’s slow, but there’s schools there in Three, and she’s still pretty little. Eight, nine maybe? Figured maybe she can still find something better than she’d have here. Folks used to treat the poor kid like a pet when she ran around her granny’s table at the Hob, throw her scraps and the like.” The anger colored his tone again. 

She was about to reply to that, when the front door swung open and there was Peeta, blond and smiling and looking absurdly healthy compared to when she’d seen him last in January. He hobbled his way out onto the porch, arms open to give her a hug, and sensing that he’d be hurt if she refused, she let him do it. “Good to see you, Johanna,” he said, and she knew he meant it, and as more than a courtesy.

“You’re looking good, Hotbuns,” she told him, meaning it as well. Hard to connect this boy to the half-feral being that had lived next to her, prodded into madness, alternating rage and tears. Katniss lurked in the doorway too, cautious as ever, hand raised in polite greeting, but she looked calm and healthy too, rather than the catatonic waste case she’d been after her sister’s death and during her trial. It hit her hard, a lump in her throat. So that was what it looked like to bounce back from being nearly destroyed. The weight of failure descended even harder, crushing her down just that little bit more. All the morphling seemed like a pathetic excuse. It felt like she often had near Finnick, who’d been whored out and hurt and yet hadn’t lost himself. That was the difference having someone to love and live for made. Her gaze flicked over to Haymitch, seeing the rueful, momentary smile on his lips as his eyes met hers. _I know._ No wonder he drank even more than before, seeing the two of them. There was the odd duality of happiness for someone who’d become dear, even if she could never admit it directly to him, all the while feeling even more worthless and loathsome and almost angry and resentful, because if it was possible to live a life worth living after all of it, why the hell did she never have even an ounce of good fortune and the chance to make it happen? Same reason she’d never had any goodness in her life, seemed like. _Because you don’t deserve it, do you?_

She wasn’t sure whether she loved or hated them in that moment, but they were the only people she had. Besides, she’d had to swallow back her emotions and endure far worse, for far higher stakes. “Heard you made cake?” she said, patting Peeta on the shoulder and gesturing towards the front door.


	3. Chapter 3

There was a certain comfort to things in Twelve, Johanna found. In Seven, she’d gotten up and been accountable to nobody and nothing. If she’d wanted to lie in bed all day, for days on end, not like anyone cared. Days had passed in a haze, even days without the morphling, looking up to see the summer sunset and nothing done at all that day aside from staring at the television and not letting any of the ridiculous, stupid programming register that much. It killed time in meaningless days, that was all.

But here, she got up, brushed her teeth and combed her hair, went with Haymitch two doors down to where Peeta and Katniss would have breakfast ready for the four of them at 8 in the morning. She suspected there was a cycle there too, based on the train’s appearance every two weeks: for a day or so after the train, there might be milk and fresh sausage or bacon, then later the eggs gave out, and in the days before the train like today, it would be down to non-perishables. Toast from Peeta’s fresh bread, oatmeal, and coffee, strong and black. 

“It’s likely just tomato soup and bread for dinner,” Peeta said, almost apologetically. “We’re even out of cheese to make grilled cheese sandwiches. But we do have some dried cherries, so I’ll try to put together a crumble at least.” Johanna shook her head slightly, amused and somehow both touched and aggravated at Peeta’s constant efforts to try and keep things cheerful in their hellhole existence.

“Can’t help it, kiddo,” Haymitch said, tipping back his coffee mug for the last dregs, leaning back in his chair. He’d slept badly last night, eyes red-rimmed and deeply shadows. She’d heard the whimpers and yells even down the hall, startling her awake, caught in a trap of imagining she was back in the Detention Center by that sheer sound of human terror and horror. The creak of floorboards and then the squeak of the stairs told her he’d gone downstairs, probably to have a drink and read something until he was too exhausted to stay awake again. He’d still woken up before her, but she’d seen the blanket on the faded green couch in the parlor, the one with well-worn cushions that she imagined he’d used as a bed nearly as often than his actual bed. “No refrigeration and no fresh supplies coming in from around here--”

Katniss shoved her chair back from the table with a bang, granite-grey eyes blazing as she popped to her feet. “You know, it’s not my job to provide for all of you!” she spat angrily, looking in a rapid-fire sweep at each of the three of them. Slapping a palm down on the table, she turned and stalked away, long black braid shaking against her back like the sinuous motions of an angry snake about to strike. 

She gave a snort of amusement, scraping the last of the oatmeal from her bowl and licking the spoon, savoring the taste of brown sugar. But it was the fake shit, of course, white sugar sprayed with molasses from Eleven--and suddenly she longed for the taste of real maple sugar. “Looks like the sexual frustration’s finally getting to her.”

Haymitch didn’t react, no surprise there. Peeta, true to form as a teenage boy, blushed, his cream-fair cheeks glowing a bright pink. She thought about prodding him further, telling him that if he wanted to fuck Katniss, getting that embarrassed proved how young he really was. Haymitch instead reached for the coffeepot and calmly poured himself another cup. “It’s June 23rd today. Primrose’s birthday,” he said mildly, taking a sip.

That was quintessential Haymitch, a cryptic message he trusted she could decipher. All right, that explained Katniss’ agitation, and when she looked at Peeta’s face she could now read the stir of anguish and anger there along with the embarrassment, but she didn’t quite get the whole situation. The anger burned within her suddenly--what did they want from her anyway? Was she supposed to automatically understand all the unspoken experiences and knowledge and the like that they all had from those shared roots? Maybe she had that with Haymitch to some degree, from all the experiences as victors that both these children had been so utterly fucking lucky as to miss, but she felt like a kid on the other side of a plate glass window, looking in on everyone else. It felt too much like last summer, Haymitch and Katniss and Peeta with their plans, and her as one small cog they let into it only on the periphery. She’d seen well enough in the Capitol during Katniss’ trial where Haymitch’s loyalties stood, that the damn girl would always come first for him, no matter how much Katniss took him for granted or treated him with contempt. Some people just liked humiliation. 

“Hey, sorry I’ve pissed all over your little District Twelve alliance,” she said, kicking her own chair aside as she stood. “Trust me, I can catch the next train out. I told Aurelius you’re all alive and well, my job’s done. Answer the damn phone when he calls from now on so he doesn’t bug me, huh?”

The geese waddled along the path as she headed back towards Haymitch’s house, minding their own business and searching for food. She saw the slightly crooked wing on the one, and the scars and still-missing feathers on the other. She had an odd sense of fellow feeling for them: two more beings trapped in this place. Three days until the train came. She had just enough morphling to get by until then if she used it judiciously--there had been some bad days where she’d used more heavily--though the craving was there to keep in a mindless haze right until the train pulled up and carried her away from yet another place she didn’t belong. 

She glanced out, but not down the hill towards the ruin of the town, but instead up towards the rolling ridges of the mountains, covered in trees. The fence, Peeta had told her, was down because of the lack of electricity. She could easily slip out. It would be a place she could be alone, and it might wipe clean the lingering echo of the last forest she’d been in, the jungle of the Quell arena. But she was Seven enough, bred in blood and bone and soul, to not be stupid enough to go wander in an unfamiliar woods alone, distracted, and weaponless. Besides, after the Quell, it was hard to trust even something like a forest. She hadn’t walked even in the safe woods back around Seven. Stuck, every bit as stuck as those poor idiot geese. 

Whether he’d finished his coffee or simply given her a few minutes by herself, by the time Haymitch found her, she’d calmed down thanks to a shot of morphling. “So, do I get a blanket excuse to be an asshole on Heike and Bern's birthdays?” she quipped, flopping back on her bed with her hands laced over her chest. But she raised her head and grinned to let him know it was a teasing joke, feeling the mellow bliss of the morphling rasp off the sharp edges of the angry barb it would have been otherwise. Heike and Bern couldn’t hurt her, not when she felt this good. “And Peeta, hell, he gets two freebie days each year from this deal, just like me. You and Katniss are screwed. Only one dead sibling each.” 

He laughed, sitting down on the edge of the bed a little heavily in the way that told her he’d been drinking, before she even smelled the whiskey fumes on his breath, an odd but somehow not unpleasant contrast with the scent of lemon soap. “She doesn’t want to be responsible for people,” he told her. “Katniss, I mean.”

Johanna clucked her tongue at that, flinging her hands wide for a moment. “Can’t argue with her on that. Smart. You and Hotbuns seem to be the idiots hurrying to assume responsibility for _everything_.”

Another of those low, gruff sounds in his throat that she knew was a chuckle he didn’t want known. “She went hunting for years to keep that sister of her alive. Volunteered for her. Didn’t do a fucking thing in the end. And Peeta, Capitol captured him. Twelve got destroyed. The people she cared about, tried to protect...did everything she could. It didn’t matter. They still got hurt or killed.”

Her thoughts a slower trickle, a steady stream rather than a rapid-rushing river like they were, but they were calmer, stripped of all the emotional baggage. She didn’t even resent Katniss right now. It made sense, didn’t it? All those years Katniss had gone hunting in the woods for that little sister, being out in the woods would only remind her of that anyway. Plus after the Quell she might mistrust the woods as well, and Johanna couldn’t blame her. And of course she didn’t want to provide for people, be responsible for their survival. Hell, a mentor understood that better than anyone, in a way Peeta never could. She and Haymitch both had tried their best to save innocent kids, and failed miserably, watching them butchered on the screens on Mentor Central. “Then it’s a good thing she doesn’t care about you.” She meant it to be funny, teasing, a shared joke between the two people nobody gave a shit about, not at all a pointed knife-thrust. 

But she saw the momentary flash of pain on his face, like throwing a rock into a still pond, and felt a curious swell of guilt. The alcohol always lowered his defenses a bit, didn’t it? But he recovered, mustered that little nonchalant smile that was his mask. “Guess so.”

“Or me either,” she added, by way of apology. He wouldn’t want her to openly say she was sorry and explain it and turn it into an even more awkward thing. The smile turned more wry in acknowledgment, but less fake. “Too many memories out there right now. I get it. Don’t blame her.”

He nodded at that, shifted his weight slightly on the bed, hands clasped and resting his forearms on his knees. “So, you’re planning to head out on the next train?” 

She shrugged, suddenly feeling awkward lying back with him sitting right there, like some weird lovers’ tableau. Sitting up back against the pillows, crossing her legs and resting her hands loosely on her knees, she shrugged again. “Not like you three need me here.”

“Not like Seven needs you there either.” Now it was her turn to feel that pang of pain at having her lack of place, rejected by everyone, pointed out so openly. But like her, he hadn’t meant it cruelly. That was a nice thing about Haymitch, and always had been. They could be more or less honest about how shitty it all really was. “Not like they need me here either,” he added, echoing her own tacit apology tactic. “And I know, not quite home sweet home with the extra work given what a wreck the district’s in.”

“You could bring ‘em to Seven,” she offered. “Make everything easier on all of you.”

He shook his head. “Katniss can’t. Part of the plea deal I got them to make on Coin’s murder,” and she sensed only with her would he use that matter-of-fact honesty, “was that she’d stay within the confines of Twelve. Out of sight, out of mind, until people all forget about her. Maybe they’ll mellow in time, but I ain’t testing that only a few months in, maybe make them dig their heels in for good by setting a precedent. Paylor does say they’ll start the cleanup efforts here by August, so that’s something. Might well have power for the winter.”

“And you won’t leave, I imagine.” She didn’t bother bringing up Peeta. No chance he’d leave.

“Perulla--her ma--signed over custody, so I’m now legally her guardian until she turns nineteen next May. Peeta’s too, until next February, since he’s orphaned.” Nice way to avoid the question of whether he’d leave if he could, because chances were they both knew that he wouldn’t, but she wouldn’t press it. His shoulders dipped slightly in a shrug. He looked at her, eyes meeting hers for a moment, and then flicking aside. “You’re welcome to stay. Probably better you be with people who’ve been through it anyway.” 

It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement: _stay because you’re screwed up enough that we’re the only fit company for you_ , but there was a weird comfort to it all the same. She couldn’t say she firmly belonged here, the only Seven outsider in this strange place, but she hadn’t belonged in Seven for sure. It wasn’t like smooth, hand-in-glove security, but here she felt less like a broken brick jutting awkwardly out from the wall than anywhere else. 

She wouldn’t have belonged down in Four with Annie either. Seeing Katniss and Peeta, that quiet intimacy growing between them, fragile as spidersilk and yet every bit as strong, hurt sometimes. But she’d experienced that glum feeling ever since she was a teenager, watching everyone else pair off and always being ignored. And unlike Annie with her widowhood and her newborn, two more things that would always have kept a wall between them, at least here she had Haymitch. “Eh, I might stick around a bit longer. Not like I’ve got that much pressing business back home,” she answered him, not quite meeting his eyes as she said it.

Katniss obviously wouldn’t want some attempt at a sad woeful bond over how they’d both lost little sisters, blah blah--she and Haymitch figured out early the best thing to do with that shared misery was acknowledge it existed and so the understanding was there, but not dwell on it or try to force each other to talk about it. Besides, if she’d turn to anyone, it would be Peeta, not the outsider who’d never even met Primrose Everdeen. 

The rest of the morning came and went in a blur--they skipped the effort of making a hot lunch in favor of slapping together a peanut butter sandwich, or simply snacking through the day. So after a few handfuls of trail mix, Johanna went to go cut more much-needed firewood. Between laundry, cooking, bathing, and all the rest, the stove was a greedy and ever-hungry mouth to feed. Back in Seven, their firewood rations were wood left drying at least a year, if not two, constantly feeding the communal stockpile for the years to come. So their wood supply came in by train from Seven’s stockpile, well-seasoned oak and maple and birch. At least the wood allotment for four people, even for all those chores, wasn’t too dire. Still, she’d started a small woodpile out in the old gardener’s shed on the Village green, but it was still utterly green, sap slowly drying out. It wouldn’t be ready for winter. The cold would only increase the need for wood, given the likelihood of a nightly fire in the fireplace. 

Shaking her head grimly, grabbing the axe from the shed, she hoped Paylor’s minions got the elecricity, and thus the heating and cooking and hot water, back long before that. For her part, the firewood chopping was more killing time than anything useful for the essential firewood supply. Alone, and without a buddy for a whipsaw or even one of the chainsaws the Capitol allowed the lumberjacks only rarely, she was stuck scavenging fallen trees, and only near the very edge of the Meadow, since she wouldn’t venture into the unknown territory of the mountain forest. It reminded her too much of the goblin stories and fairy tales told to Seven children about the woods, a place that could be dark and foreboding or full of wonder, only folks never knew which until they knew the place. Seven knew their woods like the back of their hand, so it was safe. Here, not so much, and the specter of that damn jungle choked her like sawdust-filled air.

Stalking through the shin-high grass, smelling the heady perfume of the wildflowers that filled the Meadow in a violent burst of gaudy color, she headed for the treeline, seeking the downed chestnut tree she’d begun chopping two days ago. Creative Twelve minds there with their tiny, insular small town hadn’t even bothered to actually name it-- _the_ Meadow, whereas in Seven it would have been something like “Brook’s Meadow, the one that’s near Cedar Camp”, out in the far northwest cutting territory. 

Axe soon in rhythm, it felt good to attack something and get out some of her frustrations, but it was never enough, could never be enough, to root out everything dug in deep within her. It would do for an hour or two to burn off a little steam, but only the morphling could smother it all so she could get through it. Still, she had a small bundle of firewood to add to the heap when she headed back towards the Village, panting from far more than the summer heat and the weight of the wood. An hour or so of chopping exhausted her now. Chances were she’d sleep well tonight because of it. Seeing Haymitch on his porch, casually pitching food to the two ecstatic geese, she nodded as she passed, sensing as ever he’d been waiting to see that she came back. She wondered for a dizzy, crazy moment if she didn’t come back if he’d assume she’d gotten hurt and drag the kids out to look for her, or assume she’d disappeared by her own choice. Another of those questions she didn’t quite want to ask him--maybe she didn’t want the answer, and maybe she didn’t want to force him into considering it. It was one of those things better left unexplored in their mutual agreement to respect each other’s privacy.

“Time to clean up before dinner?” she asked him. She still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of being back on routine yet to the point of clock-watching. It would have reminded her too much of Thirteen’s ass-puckered rigidity, except she had to admit that in this case, coordinating meals was more about the convenience of the four of them working together in a lousy situation and limited supplies.

“About forty-five minutes,” he told her, throwing another handful of food to the geese, who seemed to be every bit as much on schedule as the rest of them regarding mealtimes. She shook her head, trying to not roll her eyes. When she asked, he’d admitted to getting goose feed sent from Ten. _Bread’s not good for ‘em, so I hear._ Some part of her hoped the two of them couldn’t migrate again, which probably would have sounded twisted had she said it aloud. But she could see even as much as the geese more or less took care of themselves, he actually cared about the damn things, and having them leave would be one more abandonment to a man who’d endured too many rejections already.

In high summer as they were, the tap water was lukewarm already. Good thing, since the stove here at Haymitch’s usually had embers during the day since he tended to make coffee after lunch--the man had practically lived on black coffee some days in Mentor Central--but she’d have had to coax that back to life in order to heat up water for bathing.

Stripping off in the bathroom upstairs and dropping her sweaty clothes in a heap, she ignored the bathtub and shower as ever, by this point able to not instinctively shudder at them. Still wouldn’t go near them, especially the shower. The thought of water on her face, in her eyes and nose, reminded her too much of the buckets thrown over her, of fingers rough against the back of her skull shoving her head under the surface of a tub of water-- though thank fuck her hair was too short to grab then, she’d made sure of that ever since Thalius Eland years ago--she kept herself off the edge with only an effort at the memories. There was time. She could hit a little morphling before dinner to calm down if needed.

Wetting the washcloth in the sink, she scrubbed herself down thoroughly, using the lemony soap that kept getting sent in their supplies now. Probably because they figured it worked for both males and females without a problem. It had taken a while even to get to this point, even a thorough sink bath. She remembered with disgust being back in Thirteen early on, so unaware of her own gathering stink from living in it, trying to ignore the dark crescents beneath her fingernails, that finally they’d sedated her and scrubbed her down. Waking up clean but rage-filled and feeling oddly violated, she’d sworn that would never happen again, so she’d forced herself to the point where she could scrub down enough to meet Thirteen’s oh-so-condescending hygiene approval, and by now, it was all right. She could still barely imagine that she’d once loved a long, hot shower, especially after a childhood of a tin washtub like the kid she now saw down in both Peeta and Haymitch’s kitchens, for the weekly full bath the other three took. The rest of the week, they scrubbed down in a spit bath like this, same as her.

Eyeing her reflection in the mirror, she tried to ignore her too-thin cheeks again, and the shadows beneath her eyes. She ran a hand through her hair, combing it out a bit, grown out now down to below her ears from its shaved state last September. Longer than it had been in years, but she resisted the urge to cut it, reminding herself the Capitol was no risk now. This was her own little badge of defiance now. Even not washing it, because of the terror of having the water pouring over her head, seemed to not be a problem; after a month or two the greasy sheen disappeared, as if her hair somehow adjusted.

Dropping her clothes in the hamper, she groaned. Laundry day early next week, so Katniss said--maybe she should hop on the train to avoid it, remembering washboards and knuckles scraped raw from when she was a kid. Or maybe she should stick around for it to see how awkward Katniss got at having to wash Peeta and Haymitch’s undershorts, or Peeta’s red face at bras, whether Katniss’ tiny ones or Johanna’s much larger ones. At least now in summer they could hang it outdoors to dry.

Grinning at that idea, that good feeling carried her through getting dressed in some of her few remaining clean clothes, and she actually glanced at the case with the morphling vials and decided she’d be OK without it for now. So long as she didn’t let herself think too much about dead siblings and dead family--best to keep that door firmly shut. 

Katniss’ silence continued into dinner, though, as she picked at her soup and bread. Johanna caught Peeta’s concerned looks over at her, and Haymitch’s subtle headshakes at Peeta when the boy’s gaze turned his way. But the fragile truce there all fell apart near the point of the cherry crumble. 

“No thanks,” Katniss said, shaking her head as Peeta dished up the dessert. 

“Cherry’s your favorite,” Peeta argued, a plaintive note in his voice.

“I don’t want any,” Katniss answered him, tone a bit more insistent, eyes narrowing. “I’m not hungry, OK?”

“You’re not alone, you know,” and all at once Johanna hurt for Peeta, that bizarre lingering trust of his that if only he tried and cared, he could somehow make things better, and in the same moment, wanted to slap him and tell him to wake up to reality. “Prim was…”

“I don’t want to talk about her right now,” and something in Katniss’ tone set off her own awareness, and now she could see Haymitch tensing across the table as well, putting his spoon down and watching the two of them intently with that air of being ready to react in an instant.

“Not to them?” The first flashes of temper and hurt entered Peeta’s voice as he jerked a thumb towards Haymitch, and then Johanna. “Or not even to me?”

Katniss shook her head, saying again, “I said, I don’t…” Johanna could see her clamming up, feeling the pressure of being pushed where she didn’t want to go.

Peeta shook his head angrily, blue eyes flashing. “This is how it is with you. You won’t really let anyone in. You expect us all to just accept that wall of yours, and that only you get to decide exactly how close anyone gets, and it’s OK that you shove people away who care and keep expecting us to be there and drop everything when you do want us!” 

Katniss’s head rose, eyes flashing and lips drawn back from her teeth, “I didn’t ask you to be there today. I just want to be alone, Peeta, all right? You don’t understand it, you didn’t love Farl and Bannick like I loved Prim.”

“How do you know? Did you ever ask about me and Farl and Bann? You think you’re the only one whose love counts? Whose pain counts?” Peeta leaned over the table, staring at Katniss. “Look at them!” He flung a hand out towards Johanna and Haymitch. “Think about everything they went through, they lost their families too, they got sold off by Snow, Johanna got tortured, Haymitch’s been alone all these years watching kids die and getting blamed for it!” A strange growling note entered his voice, lips drawing back from his teeth in a snarl, body starting to tremble from the sheer force of his anger. “But it’s always _you, you, you,_ isn’t it, Katniss? Even in volunteering for her, it didn’t matter to you that she’d probably die slowly starving to death with you gone--your ma and her both looked far too merchie for Gale to care, didn’t they--all that mattered is that _you_ wouldn’t have to be there to watch it. Wouldn’t have to be there to watch me pick up the pieces after you got killed in the Quell, either. You’re so fucking selfish.”

Like a shot, Haymitch was on his feet, pointedly placing himself in between Peeta and Katniss, and he snapped at Johanna, “Get her out of here.”

Something about his tone made her do it, and Katniss didn’t protest either, looking guilty and fearful all at once. As she pushed Katniss ahead of herself through the door into the parlor, she heard Peeta’s voice rising again, “...expendable one, you always take her side, don’t you!”

Katniss slumped down into a buttercup-yellow wing chair, drawing her knees up to her chest in a tight huddle. Johanna glanced over at her. She at least would respect what the girl had yelled at Peeta, because she understood that feeling all too well. “You want to be alone?”

“Yeah,” came the muffled reply. Katniss raised her head slightly, eyeing Johanna with a suspicious glare. “You don’t want to know what that’s all about?”

Johanna smiled thinly at her, resisting the urge to laugh because it would likely be taken the wrong way. “Oh, Kittycat, I know it. I listened to him raving and screaming for six weeks while they broke him.” She’d heard him say things about his supposed beloved that if she were more vindictive, she could use to slice Katniss Everdeen to ribbons. Peeta too, for that matter, who’d be mortified that his darkest, angriest emotions had been so exposed. Maybe that was more why she kept her mouth shut--she knew full well what it was like to be judged only on the worst and have people create that into a whole image. “You wanna come hang out at Haymitch’s until loverboy calms down?”

She shook her head. “I’ll go next door.” Back to her old house, Johanna understood. Probably to be around memories of Prim.

“All right.” Nothing more to be done, so she slipped out of the house and headed back to Haymitch’s, trying to keep thoughts of Heike and Bern, and Peeta’s anguished howls in the Detention Center, at bay. She’d take some morphling tonight before she went to sleep, she decided. She’d need it to knock herself out peacefully and not have nightmares.

But for the moment, she waited downstairs, and boiled water for coffee. Finally she heard him come in, and looked up to see the blood spatters on his shirt, and the dark shadow of a bruise already rising on the right side of his jaw.

He brushed a hand over the stains to indicate them and said flippantly, “I know, I know, laundry’s gonna be fun.” He grinned at her, exposing blood on his teeth. She stared, thinking immediately of Snow, and he must have seen it in her face because he cringed, covered his mouth with one hand, reaching for the whiskey bottle on the counter with the other. Taking a swig, he grimaced, and headed over to the sink, spitting out the blood and whiskey. “Damn. Waste of good liquor.” He glanced again at the bottle and chuckled. “Well, liquor, anyhow.” Looking at the red label, she saw it was Boyle’s, the cheap, cut-rate stuff they sold to the poorest Capitol citizens. He took another swig, washed his mouth out again, and spat it out. The third time, he drank the whiskey down in a long pull.

“Still got all your teeth, old man?” she asked dryly.

He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Bit my cheek, that’s all. The boy accidentally headbutted me in the jaw when he was about to collapse after tiring himself out, and I was trying to keep him upright long enough to get him in a chair rather than having him hit the floor. Didn’t need a concussion to add to how bad he already feels about all of it.”

She handed him a mug of coffee. Regarding it for a moment, he took it from her and splashed some of the whiskey in it. Holding out her mug to him, he shrugged and did the same to hers. “This happen often? How dangerous is he?” No point beating around the bush.

“He’s come a long way, keeps working on it with the shrink. Used to happen maybe once a week. Been...almost a month this time? And now he just rants it out and throws a few things rather than actually going after her. I get her out of there and get between ‘em mainly out of habit, to be honest.” He gave her another of those cheeky smiles, though his tired eyes belied it. “Besides, better he yells at me than her. I can take it, and his gripes with me aren’t courtesy of hallucinogens.”

He’d screamed at Haymitch sometimes too. She remembered that all too well. The worst had been when Peeta had broken down and cried one night, alternately asking Haymitch and Katniss why they’d abandoned him and expressing that he knew he deserved it. Like a lost little boy finally pushed beyond sanity, and worse than hearing his rage. Harder to bear than what they’d done to her too, because she knew in her heart she asked the same questions, and had the same answer. _She’s the only person who means anything. We’re expendable._ Expendable--Peeta had just used that word, hadn’t he? But her rage on that had flickered out a while ago. Confronted with Haymitch’s guilt and exhaustion in Thirteen, stretched too thin trying to look after them and make amends, she couldn’t hate him anymore, or believe he’d written her--or Peeta--off without a qualm the way Plutarch or Coin had. But instead of the anger, that tired emptiness remained, a burned out space all dead and hollow. “He’s got some legitimate gripes with her, by the sound of it,” she told him dryly, unwilling to make blanket excuses for her, even if he was. A lousy day for Katniss, no question, and maybe not the day to deal with it, but she more or less agreed with Peeta about Katniss’ fairly narrow vision when it came to people.

He took a sip of coffee, and she could see him tipping his head slightly, avoiding the cut side of his mouth carefully. “True. But when he’s practically foaming at the mouth ain’t the time to deal with that.” He touched his jaw carefully near the bruise. “No shaving for a few days, looks like,” he quipped.

It crossed her mind to ask whether he’d be so dismissive of being hurt if Peeta had actually deliberately socked him in the mouth. Or maybe if the boy even had, under the influence of his berserk rage. But then, she realized she didn’t need to ask. He wouldn’t ever say.

~~~~~~~~~~

Reaping Day dawned hot and sticky, the same way it had for all the years Haymitch could remember. Humidity tended to pool here in this mountain valley and always had, and he remembered as far back as being a kid and standing in the square, sweating like hell beneath a borrowed good shirt from both the heat and the nerves. There had been one year it rained, hadn’t it? 62: Enobaria’s year. With a sendoff that grey and grim, nobody seemed particularly surprised when both the Twelve kids died right at the gong. He wasn’t either. Lorey and Brannen both gave up the moment they walked to the stage. He’d seen those dead, hopeless eyes as they ascended the steps and came to stand by him. They’d simply wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. He hadn’t told the kids that when they made the death-pages for those two. Some things were better not immortalized.

He’d just as soon have not known it was July 4th again. The Capitol’s little joke, making Reaping Day on the day that apparently had been a huge deal about freedom and liberty to the United States, one of the old countries before the Fall. West Virginia, that was why they’d called it, in a region called the Appalachians. Before it was MD-12, Military District 12, and then simply District Twelve. 

But Katniss, on an exercise from Aurelius, kept a calendar in Peeta’s kitchen that she marked off each day with a red “X”. When he stared at it, wondering what the point was in keeping track of dates in a place like this, the girl scowled defensively and said, “After...June 23rd,” she didn’t say “Primrose’s birthday”, he noticed, “he told me to count off each day. Turn it into a ‘small victory’ or something. I have to journal and the like too.” She pointedly got very interested in her bowl of oatmeal, not looking at any of them.

“Journal?” Johanna asked. 

“It’s private,” Katniss said.

“I’m not gonna look under your mattress for it, Kittycat,” Johanna said dryly.

“He has me doing it too,” Peeta said, reaching for the strawberry jam. “It actually helps. Makes sense of things, let me put my thoughts and feelings in order to end the day. It’d be far too easy to lose track of everything out here.”

Glancing at Johanna, he saw she already looked back at him, a wry smile on her lips at Peeta’s words. She understood. Losing track of everything and turning it into a soft-edged blur was the point, in order to make it all bearable. Did it really matter if it was July 3rd or 4th today? Well, it mattered in that knowing it was Reaping Day, now he really _would_ have to drink to get through the day, and the night. Plus he was low on his supply, and the train wasn’t due for two more days, so he’d have to go easy on it today. Just enough to take the edge off, rather than getting good and oblivious. Damn that calendar. “I’m going down the hill,” Peeta said. “Maybe clean up the tribute cemetery a bit. They deserve to be remembered today.” Peeta looked over at him. “Haymitch?”

He swallowed the bite of toast in his mouth, feeling it as a lump all the way down his throat. Choked back the shout of _I remembered them for your fucking book_ and _As if I could ever forget any of them, any day of my life_. The boy meant well, but in the end, having forty-six dead kids obliviously rubbed in his face by Peeta Mellark, constantly reminding Haymitch of how he couldn’t save any of them, was no different than the town’s judgment on the same count. “No,” he said, making certain his tone conveyed he wasn’t going to discuss or negotiate. “I’m going to get good and drunk, thanks.”

“I’ll come with you, Peeta,” Katniss said, shooting Haymitch an impatient glance.

So the kids headed down the hill, and he and Johanna headed back to his house. “Easy for them,” Johanna said, finally breaking the silence as Haymitch shut the front door behind them. “They never mentored. Lucky little shits.”

“Yeah.” He found the bottle and silently toasted to Larkspur and Dean, Jimmie and Fern, Lorey and Brannen, and all the rest of them. He had his own ways of remembrance, and sitting there in the parlor with Johanna on the other end of the couch in a peaceful near-silence, caught up in a comfortable fog of whiskey that made it just a little better, he suspected she went over her own string of sixteen dead tributes from Seven over eight years as a mentor. All in a row like a string of beads: grim, bloody red skull beads. But he wouldn’t demand their names, or their memories, from her. “Fuck the Hunger Games,” he offered at last.

She laughed that soft, distracted, laugh that told him she was good and loaded. “Fuck the Hunger Games,” she agreed, sighing and leaning back against the back of the couch, head tipping back and eyes closed. At least here was one Reaping Day he wasn’t alone to deal with all of it. That was something unexpected, and oddly precious for it.

Two days later, Peeta broke the news. “We’re going to have to stretch the supplies just a little more. The train’s going to be here in two days, not today. I know we were all hoping for a great dinner tonight, but...they got delayed by the hospital construction in Four.”

“Figures that Ma would screw up the food supply again,” Katniss muttered, and he heard it, but his attention was on Johanna’s panicked look at him, and the sick sensation within him now. She’d used up the last of her morphling yesterday, and he’d overdone it a little on Reaping Day, barely had any liquor left, and he’d take those last sips tomorrow for sure. He could already feel the effects faintly--the unrest in his stomach, the sweat that wasn’t due solely to the July heat, the restlessness. Two more days? He knew better than to ask if they had any liquor around. Even a desperate notion of Peeta’s vanilla extract crossed his mind, if only for a moment, though the thought of swigging that actually made his gut churn all the more. 

“We’ll get by,” he said, trying to keep his tone casual. “We’ve all got some trail mix and peanut butter and whatever--you baked yesterday, so we’ve got bread. We’ve all eaten much less, or much worse, in our lives.” He shrugged, trying to make it seem like no big thing, even as something within him shrieked in terror. He could never forget the agony of those days here last winter after Peeta sanctimoniously dumped all the liquor, or Coin’s dismissive words in Thirteen. He practically broke out into a worse cold sweat even thinking about it. Two days. Two days, he’d be miserable, but maybe not to the point of screaming and raving. That hit--when? That was later. “Ain’t feeling too good either, think it’s maybe a summer cold, so it’s probably best you kids stay away. Peeta, you want to ask them to put some meds on the train, since we’ve got a delay?”

“Sure,” Peeta acknowledged, giving him a look of concern. 

“Johanna?” Katniss said. “Want to come stay with us?”

“Not feeling great either,” Johanna muttered. “Think I’ve got it too.”

Schooling in Twelve was lousy, especially on science. So he honestly wasn’t sure whether the kids realized that catching the flu would be damn hard in a population of four people who hadn’t seen any outsiders for two weeks now, or simply politely agreeing to his fiction. He’d simply accept it with gratitude.

Once the kids were away, Johanna turned to him. “They cleaned you up in Thirteen.”

“And last winter, to train up for the Quell,” he admitted, beyond worrying about how pathetic it sounded that they’d gotten him fully sober twice in the space of six months and it hadn’t worked either time. At least Johanna wouldn’t judge. Hazelle had been the one to look after him, the first time. With any luck, the kids wouldn’t even think about the whole withdrawal issue, because it didn’t enter into their minds.

She nodded, scratching nervously at one forearm. “Finn told me...they only let him peek in the window after he threw up a huge fuss, just to make sure you were alive…”

Johanna prevaricating maybe did more to unsettle him than most anything else. If she was uncertain, scared even, that told him far too much. “I worked in the infirmary, but the detox unit was separate. I don’t know what it’s like getting cut off morphling,” he told her honestly. 

“I do,” she said bluntly. “They forced me off it so I could go do the military training, remember?”

“Ah. But at least there you had people to look after you.”

“I’m using more than I was then.” She said it without shame, simply stating a fact in a tired tone of voice. Kept scratching at her arms too.

“You itching?” He nodded towards it. 

She seemed to realize it and stopped, though he saw the red marks there where she’d dug her nails in. Now she gave him a sly grin that was pure Johanna Mason. “Well, there are much worse places to be itchy, right?” Then she sobered. “I’m feeling sick. Like it actually is the flu. And you, are you gonna die or what?”

“Nah.” He smiled at her without any real humor, though he wanted to laugh at the bleak absurdity of it all. It had been worse the second time in Thirteen, and he could only hope this time wouldn’t be even worse. But this would be only two days. He could manage that. “Probably just gonna wish I would.” She actually did laugh. “But I’ve got a little bit I can take tomorrow still. Not enough to stave it all off, but to keep me from...the worst.” It might keep away the raving and screaming and body-breaking pain long enough for the train to get there, and long enough to keep Johanna, suffering herself, from having to try and look after him. “We’ll do better keeping an emergency supply on hand from now on,” he told her. “Enough so that if the train’s late again, we’ll be a bit miserable, but not totally laid out.”

She nodded at that, looking relieved. That was how they both worked. Better to deal with it by being prepared next time and having a plan, rather than yammering about what the next couple of days would be like. “We’ll get through,” she told him, nodding. “Keep water right nearby. Keep the windows open.”

“Have a bucket there in case you can’t make it to the bathroom. And let’s both try not to puke on the sheets, laundry’s a pain in the ass,” he picked up the thread of it, and given her knowledge and his of the ordeal ahead, they could try to be prepared as much as they could while they still had time.

No need for either of them to go on about the fear, or the small comfort of having someone else there enduring it, and not being a judgmental asshole looking down on someone and thinking, _addict_ and _pathetic_ and _weak_. The relieved look in her eyes told him plenty.


	4. Chapter 4

Brocade Paylor was as good as her word. Not that Johanna put too much stock in that as an objective quality, given that Snow had certainly kept his promises and threats as well. But by mid-July, the trains arrived, bringing with them a flurry of equipment, workers, supplies. Everything from two bulldozers to sheets of plywood to kegs of nails to massive quantities of food to generators to big fluorescent yellow 10 gallon water jugs for the workers to draw from in the summer heat. The formerly dead district center near the ruins of the Justice Building now teemed with a command post and the sounds of voices and power tools and the groan of the construction equipment chewing into the heaps of broken and burned stone and ashes.

Now and again she watched another black zippered bag taken to the slapped-together morgue shack, presumably to wait for burial until they cleared all the rubble and recovered all the remains. Barely anything in there, to judge, every time. There must have been only bones. “You think they’re going to be able to identify any of them?” she asked Haymitch, as they signed for the supplies due to head back to Victors’ Village with them. The food and essentials, yes, but the morphling was there too, and that was an acute relief.

He turned, and in his face there was an expression of such gravity it took her aback, eyes flat and weary and confused. It wasn’t grief, not like she’d seen on him before as he beat himself up over yet another dead kid. He hurried back up the hill, and she looked back over her shoulder, back down at the hubbub below. She couldn’t read his mind and know what was in there, and she knew better than to ask. If he wanted her to know, he’d say. But it unnerved her all the same. 

But she was hardly alone. It was too noisy. She could see it in all of them, the edgy nervousness at being confronted with so many faces, so many voices, after months and months of the comparative serenity of being the only four people around. They tended to avoid the newcomers--even the sound of Seven accents couldn’t draw her in that easily. Of course they would have brought people from Seven, carpenters for the building and all. Nobody understood timber like them. But they hadn’t wanted her around when she lived in the winter town. It wasn’t like she could walk up to them and pretend some kind of easy familiarity now. 

In the first days of August, huge shiny silvery panels went right from a flat-bed train, set up around the cleared areas of the square, angled towards the sky. “Solar panels,” Peeta said over dinner that night, all of them gratefully scarfing down a meal of roast beef and mashed potatoes. It seemed like she couldn’t get enough of fresh meat in the few days after each train delivery that they had it, and it was best to gorge while they could, because they couldn’t keep either raw meat or leftovers that long in a cooler. “The power should be back tomorrow.” When they all looked at him, he shrugged. “I’m the one who answers the phone,” he reminded them, face utterly serene. She admitted, at least to herself, to being impressed. She wouldn’t have been able to say it without an edge of snark, or at least a sarcastic arch to her eyebrows. Though she suspected in some ways, Peeta’s method of getting people off balance was to simply not oblige when they expected him to get pissy about something. She’d tried it and been stonewalled, and after she got over the irritation, she’d figured that out.

Haymitch grunted dismissively at that, reaching for more potatoes as Katniss handed him the bowl. “Makes sense to try to get a power source right here. Running powerlines all the way from Five to each district was always more about Capitol control than anything.”

“You reckon that’s part of why we always had so many brownouts?” Katniss asked, reaching for another roll. “The distance?”

“Farthest district from Five,” Haymitch pointed out.

“You realize this means we’ll have the refrigerator back?” Peeta cut in, eyes shining with excitement. “ _And_ the electric stove, and oven, and the washer and dryer, and the water heater…” 

His almost orgasmic groan of contentment make her smirk. “Ooh, we know what gets you off, Hotbuns. All the appliances.”

“Hot showers, finally,” he teased her right back, but one look at her face and she could see the smile sliding away like water skittering off a greased pan. “Johanna, I’m s--”

She interrupted, firmly but not angrily, because she could take his understanding, but she couldn’t take his pity. That was one thing he’d never learned that Haymitch had. “Washer and dryer, that’ll be nice.”

“Yeah,” he answered, nodding, but there was still a crestfallen look on his face, his implacable armor dented. She felt like she’d kicked a kitten. 

She had dishes with Peeta that night, which could be awkward given he’d probably try to apologize and make it right or whatever. They’d asked when she first arrived if she wanted to swap that permanently for some other chore, and she’d resisted snapping that she could damn well immerse her hands in water. She wasn’t as weak and terrified as she’d been on the Block, when even a flooded street freaked her out. Even toyed with the idea again of risking a nice hot bath, so long as she could lock the door and know that nobody would come in there and try to drown her, hold her under until her lungs screamed for air and she knew she was about to die. But she hadn’t, because it meant asking for water boiled for her to fill the bathtub, and they’d all know she was trying it, and she didn’t want them to know in case it failed. Maybe even if it succeeded, because they might make a big deal out of it. 

And the notion of a shower, water on her head, her face--no. Not that. Not ever. Even the hint of a rain cloud in the sky had her diving for the safety of indoors still. “We’ll get the dishwasher back too, come to think of it,” she said, nodding towards the long-unused compartment below the counter. Probably spiderwebs in there by this point, or who the hell knew what else. “That’ll be useful, huh?”

“I can’t stand to have Katniss on top of me,” Peeta confessed, seemingly apropos of nothing. She turned to stare at him, astonished, and watching his face flaming bright red in embarrassment. “Not...I mean, it’s that...you’re not the only one who’s got...problems.

“If you’re looking for sex advice…” Fuck’s sake. Did he buy into the whole _Johanna’s a raging slut who’ll nail anything that moves_ story? Oddly, it hurt to think that he did. Not that she could deny screwing her share of men, and women, but that was all about control, because it seemed like sex was the only place she could assert herself against them. If she could have had that reassuring sense of fierce control over a Capitolite with axethrowing or beer brewing or playing dominoes, honestly, that would have been equally fine. It wasn’t like she’d really enjoyed the sex: a few moments of a joyless orgasm at best, followed by the disgust and the urge to get away. 

“We haven’t done that,” he hurried to reassure her, somehow finding an even deeper shade of red. She marveled at noticing the tips of his ears actually turned purple. “Just..maybe I’m sitting and she’s standing and leans down to kiss me, or we’re out in the Meadow and she leans over me to do it...there’s a part of me that wants to shove her away as hard as I can, and run. And scream.”

She made a mental note that she’d better tell Haymitch to get the kids some contraceptive shots ordered soon. If they didn’t need it now, they’d likely need it soon enough. “They strapped you down and tortured you,” she said, keeping her tone calm as she could. “I’d say it makes sense that you get antsy when you feel like someone’s there looming over you.” Even someone as tiny as Katniss, and as dear to him.

“You have that problem?” She could have gotten angry about him prying like this, but there was a plaintive note to it. Silly boy, to reveal too much, reach out so openly--but a boy, still young, still with a chance. Still able to hope that he’d somehow find his way out of the labyrinth.

“It was a problem long before they decided to try and turn me into an electric eel. They held me down, or tied me down, and fucked me.” She still couldn’t stand to have anyone on top of her pinning her down, to the point where all those club encounters had been simply about asserting to a Capitolite, any Capitolite, that she was the one who’d say where and when and how. She tried to keep her tone as neutral as she could. Didn’t add in all the details she could have to horrify him, make him feel dirty and guilty for asking, didn’t use the snappish tone that part of her wanted to help chase him off. “So yeah.”

“It wasn’t the Detention Center with me either,” he admitted, voice barely above a shamed whisper. “All the way back from when I was a little kid, I’ve always hated feeling cornered. My ma.”

In that moment she wished she could identify Peeta’s mom’s remains from all the dead down there in the square, if for no other reason than to kick them, repeatedly, and maybe piss on them for good measure. “Sorry.” There didn’t seem to be much more she could say than that. “I can’t tell you it gets better.” Peeta nodded miserably, continuing to scrub the same spotlessly clean dish he’d been scrubbing for the past two minutes. Somehow she felt compelled to offer him even the smallest, stupidest spark of hope. “But that’s me. Maybe with her, someone you care about, it’ll be different. In time, and whatever.”

“Maybe.” He handed her the plate, and she carefully dried it, putting it neatly on the stack on the counter to go back to the cupboard. “Hey,” his tone turned almost artificially bright, “think there’s any chance we can get some ice cream in the next delivery, if the freezer works?”

“Oh, that’s not fair,” she said with a groan. “You’re gonna make me dream of that for the next two weeks now.” Especially with the morphling, her sweet tooth seemed to roar to life when her appetite was on. He chuckled and smiled at her cheekily, and something twisted in her heart. Maybe it was that he was simply much easier to like than Katniss, maybe it was the shared ordeal in the Capitol, and maybe because he wouldn’t feel like a replacement. Bern had been older than her; she’d never had a little brother. If Haymitch seemed to put Katniss first, that was fine. She knew what it was like to never be the one chosen, so Peeta would be her priority.

 

The next night, as they headed up to bed, the house flickered to life with a series of beeps as the clocks and everything came back on. She stared in something like wonder at the soft glow of the lights in the evening dusk, and reached over to blow out the lantern. After getting used to the dim lighting of a single candle and going to bed early, lighting up the night like this seemed magical, and almost decadent. “Do we really need to turn on the television, even if we can?” Haymitch asked her dryly, both of them staring at the dust-covered screen in his parlor, visible through the open door from the hallway.

“Did we really miss it? Trust me, the programming’s shit.” It wasn’t easy to forget those lost hours in Seven glued to the couch, days gone by with nothing more than a dim impression of mindless crap of the television.

“Maybe I’d watch if there’s a ‘Splendor’ marathon,” he said, tongue-in-cheek, “though maybe that’s considered taboo to broadcast now that the Capitol’s been kicked out. Hell, even Brutus used to make fun of ‘em. We had this whole drinking game.”

“Brutus? Mister ‘Straight as a Two Arrow’?” That surprised her. 

Another of those sad, wistful smiles Haymitch got, talking about all the dead victors he’d known, people he’d let matter to him the way she never had. “He did have his good points, Brute.” 

She almost pointed out that the man had almost killed Katniss, and he’d certainly stayed Capitol-loyal until the end, but it wasn’t a fight worth picking. It wasn’t worth aggressively slicing into him, hurting him simply to win. It wasn’t like her friends were thick on the ground, now more than ever.

He nodded towards a chess set on the coffee table, dusty like everything else, but it could be easily cleaned. “You play?”

“Not well, but I know how.”

“Good. I’ll go make some coffee.” He grinned, that slightly crooked expression that was actual genuine pleasure. “Power’s on, so we’re staying up late.”

He had some wood polish beneath the sink, and enough of a good poor-raised boy to have rags on hand, so between them, sitting down on the plush carpet of the parlor floor, they made short work of cleaning and polishing the chess set. She’d suspected when she saw it, but the first swipes that took away the dust confirmed it. The bone-white and char-black of the woods was undeniable. “Ghostwood and blackspire, aren’t you posh?”

He chuckled softly at that, finishing up another of the black bishops and placing it on its square, reaching for the black queen. “Seven girl that you are, I’m sure you can tell me just how hard it is to get ‘em.”

“They’re grown in strictly protected groves to send only to One. Or...they were, anyway.” She chewed her lip at some of the memories. “Even trying to pocket a small scrap of it from one of the mills got people executed.”

He stared at the chess set bleakly now, as if the wood was somehow tainted and bloodstained. “Always different for a victor, with a victor’s wealth,” she said, mentally kicking herself. “Are these hand-carved? I’d assume from One, they would be.” It wasn’t the quality of work she’d expect from the best Seven carvers, though, so she suddenly felt a little smug on behalf of Seven for their being better than One’s artisans, and for the Capitol for being stupid enough to not notice.

“I ordered the wood from One. But I did the carving.” When she glanced over at him in surprise, he shrugged slightly, flicking the black king with his finger and tipping it over. “Always been good with a knife,” he deadpanned, giving a sarcastic twist to his mouth. “I’m sure you saw some of the Second Quell clips, anyway.” 

That made more sense of it, but she could tell it was another of those areas he didn’t want to dwell in for long. She could all too easily imagine what would have driven a man to the length of time and effort needed to carve something as elaborate as this chess set. A lot of time, and a lot of loneliness--she hadn’t turned to carving herself, because it spurred too many memories of doing it with her family, her mother’s hands steadily guiding Johanna’s small ones to show her how to handle the knife and peel a curl of wood off the block. Plus, a chess set--he couldn’t use that alone. It must have been a much younger Haymitch, one who still needed something besides booze to fill his days, and who still had even vague hopes of it somehow becoming better someday, of no longer being alone. It reminded her too much of Peeta’s frail hopes tonight, and imagining that younger Haymitch hurt in a curious way. She reached over and put the king back upright. “So, are we playing or woolgathering?”

They stayed up until the wee hours, enjoying the steady-burning light--she’d win one, he’d win one, and neither seemed to gain advantage. But finally fatigue was too much, unable to hold back yawns. “Play again tomorrow?” she asked, getting to her feet and stretching her cramped legs, glancing at the clock and startled to see that it was well past two in the morning. Chess was something else to do, besides chopping wood and avoiding the workers, something that filled the time in a way that wasn’t a direct substitute for the morphling, but it helped in those in-between times where it wasn’t so unbearable as to need the needle, but everything was still too much for her simply to sit alone with her own thoughts. 

Word was they would tear up the Meadow to make a mass grave for all those bone-bags, and the bad news came that the train would be a week late this time. Held up waiting for supplies and workers, everything running on a delay with so much in Panem still war-scarred, and a destroyed district with only a few dozen residents stubborn or crazy enough to live there wasn’t exactly highest on the list. They didn’t watch the television that much, but the news reports about the struggles for supply lines and safe housing to replace Eight’s ramshackle slum tenements, an outbreak of disease in Ten, told her that all wasn’t well to the point where Twelve would be a priority.

Still, a week late. “You have enough of a supply to get through?” she asked Haymitch lowly as they headed back to his house after dinner. She’d be running right on the ragged edge. “I’ve got enough to keep me from going totally cold, but it’ll be just enough to stave off the worst.” Two days of it was bad enough last time. It felt even worse than the worst bout of flu she’d ever had, her body pure pain in a way it hadn’t been in a long time, and from what Haymitch said and even more what he didn’t say, and what Finnick’s face had told her back in Thirteen, total alcohol withdrawal was maybe even worse.

“I’m a little better fixed than last time, but it’s gonna be rough.”

“So you’re going to be agitated and uncomfortable, but not all paranoid like you were.” He’d been convinced she was trying to kill him when she tried to check on him. For a few seconds, she’d wondered if he’d been dipping into tracker jacker venom himself, if somehow he’d become like Peeta. But then he’d called her something, some One-sounding name, a gem or the like, and she’d realized, even shaking and nauseated as she was, that he thought she was the One girl who’d almost killed him in his Games.

He gave her that fake, nonchalant smile. “Could be worse. Going totally cold, I’d be in bed for days, screaming and hallucinating and convulsing and puking.” 

She met his eyes, refusing to let him make her back down. She was a past master at the tactic of cowing people with uncomfortable truths. “Yeah?”

He closed the door behind them, kicking off his shoes the moment they entered, as was his habit. “At least I’ll be functional. Don’t expect me to be my usual cheerful self, though.”

She smirked at the joke. “So it’s going to be a lousy week. We’ve got chess, I’ve got my woodpile, we have the television even, so whatever. We’ve gotta find something else to keep our minds off it.”

“I wouldn’t suggest fucking as a distraction, particularly when we’re already feeling physically lousy,” he told her dryly. “Puking ain’t my idea of foreplay.”

“That was a different situation,” she told him equally dryly. What had happened in Thirteen, and the Capitol, wasn’t like now. Those nights, they’d tried to simply shut out the unbearable pain before they drowned in it. Miserable as morphling withdrawal was, and much as the morphling also acted as a way to keep the pain at bay, the next week was a more mundane sort of ordeal, not that overwhelming desperation. 

“It was,” he acknowledged, letting her know he’d only been teasing. Or at least, she thought he had been. But he was a smart cookie. She’d been here two months and sex hadn’t entered the picture, and they both seemed fine with that. “I’ll go find out what’s going on in town, maybe. If nothing else, hopefully someone’s got some books we can borrow. I’ve read everything in this house a dozen times.” 

It planted the notion in her brain too, and it stuck there like a burr. _Get the hell out of the house for a while._ So next morning, after breakfast, where the bacon already made her stomach churn slightly on her reduced morphling dosage, she headed down the hill. The moment she stepped outside she already missed the renewed novelty of air conditioning, because the sun blazed too bright and hot, and the sticky air felt like she could reach out and seize a handful of it.

It had been close to two weeks now since she walked down here last, but given nothing else to do but stare at the walls in Haymitch’s house and go crazier than she already was, or watch the saccharinely hopeful television programs which would probably make her want to kill someone, going for a walk was the best option she had. Funny thing how a cluster of a dozen shabby lean-to shacks could mean, and the sight of a couple of splintery boards braced across broken cinderblocks to make a table, working on sorting something from a bucket, a brace of rabbits beside it.

Then there was the man sitting out in the summer sun, District Eight to judge from that smooth caramel skin and dark hair, casting on grey wool in front of his shack. Making socks, if Johanna was any judge, though she hadn’t held knitting needles herself in years. No need for it when the Capitol regularly sent her new clothes. So back in Seven, she still had that cherry-red hat, and a well-darned pair of black mittens, three pairs of socks, and that single sock with the blue cable design. No telling where the other sock had gotten to, but she hadn’t been able to throw it away, remembering her mom sitting there knitting it by the fireside of a winter’s night. She hadn’t been able to get rid of any of it, and she wouldn’t have been able to wear it and risk wearing it out.

She walked closer, seeing that the bucket on the table held a mix of berries: mostly blueberries, a few tiny strawberries, some raspberries. So the woman there obviously had braved the woods. “Good pickings out there?” she asked.

“Strawberries and raspberries are pretty well picked over,” she answered, Twelve-born obviously from her looks and twanging accent. One of the few that had returned here, presumably to try to be among the first pioneers to remake their home. Sae Vickers, the woman Haymitch sent to Three for her granddaughter’s schooling, hadn’t been among them. This woman’s eyes were darker than Haymitch’s or even Katniss’, a deep slate grey, whites slightly jaundiced by something. She’d bound her grey-streaked black hair back with a ragged red bandana. She had a solid, stocky frame on her, but that stringy, bony look that spoke of a tough strength. “Blueberries are coming in real nice, though.”

She heard a sound behind her, the crunch of a footstep on the gravel. The berry woman’s eyes flicked up behind Johanna. “Don’t you be going after those blueberries, boy, I picked ‘em,” she said with a snort, finishing casting the last of the berries into the bucket and reaching for one of the rabbits. “Coming to trade your game with Callum, and all summer long your teeth were usually purple as anything, I know you went after those berries like crazy.”

“Ain’t got a thought of it in my head, Rooba,” Haymitch said dryly. “Snares doing well, looks like?” He nodded to the rabbits, a cloth bag jammed full of what looked like well-thumbed novels slung over his right shoulder.

“Took me near two weeks to get those. I’m too fucking old to be scrambling around in the brush like that, but gotta eat,” Rooba grumbled. “You were good, back in the day. Don’t suppose you’re interested in bringing an old lady some rabbit, boy? Got nothing to trade you right now, but you know I won’t forget.” Something passed between the two of them at a glance, some sense of shared history or the emphasis on the last words. 

“Well, if he’s not game, might be fun,” she found herself saying, hating the weirdly wistful edge that entered her tone. But being out in the calm peace of the woods, setting a snare to help bring home a badger or rabbit for the stewpot—too many years since she’d done that, out at the lumber camps. Fully ten years now. They’d never let her go to the lumber camps once she was a victor. _Why ever would you need to take all that risk and toil, Johanna? You’re wealthy now._ She glanced westward, towards the woods that covered the slope of the mountain in a bristling carpet of green, feeling something in her yearn towards it. These were unfamiliar woods, different trees and different terrain, but the forest had been a part of her, heart and soul. Something in there almost as good and peaceful as a morphling high, maybe— a week to the next train, she had to find _something_ as she rationed out the last of her supply to make it last, and he was in the same situation too. That was worth risking even the foreboding unfamiliarity of these woods, the yearning finally outweighing the foreboding, and maybe he knew them, maybe he could vouch for them and help chase off even the nagging doubts. He’d never said it outright, but things he’d said over the years, he obviously had woodland survival skills. She doubted he’d learned talent with a knife to know how to make a lethal strike just dicking around in the schoolyard, unless Twelve was incredibly weird like that, though she’d expect a much better showing from their tributes if that were the case. No, he must have gained that skill, and knowledge of plants and other things, out beyond the now-defunct fence, out among those trees. 

“All right,” Haymitch replied, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans, giving Rooba an awkward nod. “See what I can do.”

Why hadn’t Rooba asked Katniss with her certain skills, rather than Haymitch? Probably because Katniss had found a new hobby of late in building things between her and Peeta, rather than risking it all on places flooded with the ghost of old memories until she was stronger, and Haymitch was right there for the asking anyway. She nudged him in the ribs as they walked away, feeling strangely buoyed. “So hey, I’ve got a joke for you, old man, a drunk and a junkie go into the woods to catch a rabbit…”

He surprised her by laughing, and not his usual gruff bark or wry chuckle. “And the rabbit catches them instead? Eh, it beats sitting at home counting the hours to the next train,” he said with a shrug.

“Might find those blueberry bushes too, while we’re at it.” They’d almost never had berry jam in Seven, given that nobody had time to gather them in quantity and make jam during the busy summer months. It was all apple butter and the like, in the slower fall months back in the winter town. She remembered the taste of wild blueberries, a small pop of sweet-tart on the tongue, savoring the memory with pleasure. She hadn’t thought about anything like that in years.

“The boy might like it if we bring some back. Make some jam, probably some kind of dessert.” He gave her a slight smile, and she thought she saw a bounce of eagerness in his step, a shot of energy where there was usually just lethargy. He’d been like that two years ago, crackling with energy, alive with purpose. Was that the problem, all along? They simply needed to keep busy and not be left alone to brood over it all? It couldn’t be that easy.

~~~~~~~~~~

He’d always looked carefully when he went through the fence, even more so after he got caught back at age twelve carrying a couple of grouse. Looking back, he couldn’t help but think he’d almost _wanted_ to get caught, stepping out right in front of five Peacekeepers like he had, young and stupid and thinking only of how pissed he was at Phineas Fog, the Head Peacekeeper at the time, for carrying on with his ma. What a little idiot, not even imagining that Fog could have hanged people for poaching, as Dulcet had after Fog, and Thread had too. He’d only wanted to provoke Fog, and even taking a whipping seemed worth it to--what? Make Fog annoyed with the Abernathys and lay off the woman he’d been interested in for at least a dozen years? Or was it picking up on how attached Magnolia Abernathy seemed to the man, and trying to make her hate him for whipping her son? Looking back now, thirty years later, he had only unanswered questions, things he’d been too young to see fully and realize, and no chance to ask either of them what really lay beneath it all.

But after the stripes on his back, perhaps sensing that Fog might not be able to let him off with a whipping the next time, and perhaps simple animal avoidance of more pain, he’d always checked the fence with care before going in or out. So when Johanna asked him, “Hate to interrupt the meditation moment, but...are we waiting for something or what?” he came to with a jolt, embarrassed that even though he hadn’t been out there in over twenty years, old habit died hard. He’d started by looking things over to make sure it looked safe, but he’d slipped back into that old mentality along the way. 

At least olive Seam skin covered some of a blush compared to someone as merchie-pale as Peeta, or even Johanna’s Seven gold. And he could have claimed it was only the heat anyway, given they both sweated from the trip across the Meadow, pointedly avoiding the backhoe digging a long trench, tearing up the peace and serenity of the grass and flowers to turn the place into a mass grave.

Easier to lose himself in the distant past after that rough reminder of the present. “Nah, it’s fine,” he said, shaking his head impatiently, irritated with himself. “Old habits, that’s all.” Rising from his crouch surveying the fence line, dusting off the knees of his jeans, he shrugged awkwardly, heading for the rusting strands of barbed wire. 

He forced himself to not take care and check the fence. No electricity running through it, they’d be fine. Slipping through the gap, trying to not grumble at a slightly overweight forty-two-year-old trying it compared to the lithe, shorter teenager he’d been, the treeline beckoned. “Ought to just cut the damn wire.”

Turning to make sure she made it as well, she climbed nimbly through, though he’d seen her hands shaking slightly back at Rooba’s table, telling him that she wasn’t feeling at her best either. As was, he didn’t feel truly lousy yet, more exhausted and sick to his stomach. He’d drink only enough to keep it to that mild level of discomfort, because that would stretch the supply out for the week needed. “I’m sure we can steal some wirecutters from the workers. I’ll even bring ‘em back.”

He hadn’t been out here since he was seventeen, that fall after the first Games, and that hunt with Burt Everdeen where he finally realized how fucked up he was. Startling at every little noise, seeing Burt watch him with unease based on how he’d sneaked up and dispatched the wounded deer, and then stared at the blood on his hands, trying to not flip out. It wasn’t the woods of the Second Quell, but the Games had tainted even that, and there were far too many old memories of Briar out there, and if even his old friends were nervous around him, what was the point? He could well imagine why Katniss was still hesitant to come out here too often. Ghosts were one thing that couldn’t be trapped in a snare or shot with an arrow.

Even now, he walked down the old trail with trepidation. How long before he started looking around for fluffy golden squirrels, or cute little striped cat mutts? Or maybe he’d stumble across some clearing, some particular tree, and the painful memory of Briar would strike him--the soap and sunshine scent of her hair, the feel of her lips, the sheen of sunlight on her skin. Would he look and see some hallucination of a girl long buried in the ground, and a boy long dead, sitting there making out and talking about forever as only the young and stupidly innocent could?

“You all right?” he asked Johanna bluntly, if for no other reason than to cover his own uneasy thoughts.

She gave a derisive snort from behind him. “Been out in the woods all my life, sweet pea. I’m probably better off than you right now to take care of myself out here.” Instinctively he wanted to bristle and point out that he might be fifteen years older, but it wasn’t like she enjoyed the benefits of youth when she was in morphling withdrawal. “Bet you don’t even know most of the tree types out here, beyond maples and birches.”

He hid a smile, a little relieved she’d meant it as simple teasing rather than a direct cut, glad to hear her casual sass. “Sassafras,” he said dryly, jerking a thumb at the tree with its rusty-brown bark. He wasn’t exactly sure why he said his next words, but he couldn’t talk to her about Briar or Burt or Jonas or Lorna Hawthorne, about the frustration and pride of the days he’d spent teaching Ash, watching his smart as a whip little brother soak it all up like a sponge. Saying their names here might summon those ghosts up. So he couldn’t talk about sassafras tea, or the Coultrees’ homemade brew that was more or less a root beer flavored alcoholic kick in the ass. But there was one person they shared who was now lost that tugged at another memory, and so instead he said, “Heard Finnick say once that they grind the dried leaves up and use ‘em to thicken stews down in Four.”

There was a stillness behind him. He was afraid to turn, to see if he’d stepped wrong and put his foot in the shit by mentioning Finn. “He always complained nothing in the Capitol was hot enough,” she said.

“Let me guess, he probably told the patrons, ‘Nothing’s ever hot enough around here, love, except me!’, something like that?” Imitating Finnick’s higher honey-smooth tenor and slower drawling accent, he probably didn’t make the best job, but when Johanna laughed, the sort of helpless remembrance laugh for someone gone that had both tears of mirth and sorrow in it, he knew he’d nailed it. He smiled to imagine it, even as the grief twisted at him all the same. Ah, Finn--he’d have made more of this new world than Haymitch ever could. A wife, a kid, a heart and soul that hadn’t gotten totally screwed up despite it all. 

She nodded, scrubbing a hand quickly across her eyes. “Idiot would dump the pepper sauce into everything until his damn nose ran and he’d run for the bathroom half an hour later, but he loved that spice.” She reached up and plucked some of the sassafras leaves, then looking down at the sheaf of three-pronged green spikes in her hand, holding them with as much care as most other women would cradle a lover’s bouquet of wildflowers. “Maybe Peeta can ask Annie for a recipe next time they talk. Finn’s birthday’s coming up and all.” The first birthday without Finnick, at that--the man who’d never make it to twenty-six, and yet he’d lived more, loved more, dared more in those short years than Haymitch had in sixteen more. It proved as ever that the world was unfair as anything that he was alive and Finnick wasn’t, but it wasn’t a bad life to go out on, all things considered, especially compared to over a thousand dead kids who’d never even had a chance for the experiences Finnick had gotten.

“Good thing we’ve got two bathrooms and a toilet in each house,” he said dryly, and right now, the very thought of eating, let alone hell-hot District Four gumbo, sounded as unappealing as anything. But if he ended up dog-sick, somehow, it seemed worth it. Wasn’t like he hadn’t ended up puking or sick to his stomach for far worse reasons than celebrating the memory of a good friend; usually it was all about the pursuit of forgetting. He noticed she didn’t mention her birthday coming up towards the end of the month: twenty-seven. Peeta would make a cake, of course. He’d insisted on making one for Haymitch back in April, never mind that he’d barely got back from the Capitol a week before. Haymitch had sighed and given in to Peeta’s plans for a cake and a birthday dinner, because in the end, he realized it was more what Peeta needed than anything--the secure notion of family, happy celebrations, birthday cakes. Hadn’t hurt that it was a damn good cake, either.

The shade of the leaves provided a cooling canopy away from the fierce heat of the sun, though the thick August air remained, no breeze to alleviate it. Still, it made it bearable, and considering in the early stages of withdrawal he tended to get chilly, it felt good to be outside. Johanna walked ahead of him, and he saw that she’d rolled up her sleeves past her elbows, not caring out here in the woods who might see the injection marks on her arm, because it was only him anyway. One of the rifles Paylor had insisted on sending for woods ventures, probably assuming Katniss would go, was slung over Johanna’s shoulder. The other was over his own, and he hadn’t undergone the full military training she had, but Coin had dryly informed him that should it come to worse, he was expected to be able to defend Thirteen in case of a Capitol invasion. Good thing his hands had long since steadied again by that point, and he’d amused himself by learning rapidly and putting up decent marks on the firing range and rendering Coin speechless. He wouldn’t tell her he’d been an archer himself, in those long ago days with Briar and Burt and Jonas. Not Burt’s caliber then, or Katniss’ now, but good enough to bring home dinner consistently.

He’d avoided these woods so long because of the echoes of that hellishly perfect Quell forest, and his own memories of the dead. But as he followed her, telling her where to turn on the paths towards the berry bushes he remembered--up on the slopes for the best of them--it didn’t hit him as hard as he’d thought. Twenty-five years was a long, long time, and so much had changed. Some marker trees he remembered were gone now, and others had grown into giants. Berry bushes were gone from some places, and sprung up in others, picked clean by the deer already. He had to backtrack a little a few times, or stop where the old path had overgrown or lost its marker, and reason his way through it based on the memories. Good thing he’d always had an exceptional mind for navigation, because he wouldn’t admit it to her and freak her out or make her lord it over him, but they’d have been hopelessly lost within about twenty minutes otherwise. Vocal as she was, she tended to offer suggestions while he pondered the route--sometimes helpful, sometimes snarky. 

He’d feared he’d be out here and it would be like those childhood years were yesterday, but these woods were almost something new to him. That unfamiliarity might have made his awareness of danger tingle, but he wasn’t alone out here. And she wasn’t Briar, sprung from the same Seam coal dust as him, a girl utterly sure in the woods but, during that last spring, focused far more on him than on the snares. She also wasn’t Maysilee, his mirror rather than his twin, golden and fair, resourceful and bright but fatally untrained in the end, when the birds on the hunt found her. Johanna was something else different entirely. She was all Seven gold and brown rather than Seam olive and black or merchie fair and blond. Shorter than Maysilee and far more instinctively confident in the forest; much sturdier and curvier than Briar now that she'd filled her frame out again but possessed of a different, unfamiliar range of woods lore. But that was a good thing she didn't remind him of his other two woods allies. It meant she demanded her own place in his mind, and he couldn’t deny that she could hold her own out here, and so that unease slowly started to uncoil. This was almost something new to him, and with an ally he could trust that deeply, that made it all right.

The uphill climb onto the steep slopes of the valley made both of them labor for it, breathing harder and pushing probably a little too much given how run down they both were, but the beautiful sight of what looked like serviceberries, ripened to a deep purplish-black this late in the season, was enough of a spur. “Make sure it’s not nightlock,” he told Johanna, calling up to her a good ten feet uphill. 

“Thank you, Haymitch, I’ve never been in the woods before,” she said dryly. “We have serviceberries in Seven.”

“All right,” he muttered, pushing up off another sycamore, digging his toes in to climb the hill. By the time he got to the bush, she had a few of the berries plucked from the branches, cradling them in her palm, looking down at them.

She held them out to him and for a strange moment he had a vision of Katniss and Peeta in the arena, Katniss offering the boy the deadly berries. “Your local plants, your call. I’d call ‘em safe, but they might be a different species of serviceberry. Hell, we might even have different nightlock out west.”

He shook his head, not needing to see the fruit. He pointed to the bush. “Tiny, fine serrations on the leaf edges. Nightlock’s totally smooth. Can’t see that except up close.” He shut out the memory of himself at eight years old, and Briar’s oh-so-grown-up tone as she instructed him in that bit of critical plant lore. 

She nodded in acknowledgment of that. “Different, then. You look for a reddish bloom on the serviceberries, and nightlock leaves are fuzzy on the underside. The leaf veins are different too.” She popped the berries in her mouth and chewed, and even though he was sure, his heart still skipped a beat until she grinned at him with purple teeth. “Not dead yet.”

With that, they set to picking the berries, searching further up the slopes. By the end of the afternoon, they’d pulled in a good haul of blueberries, the last of the deeply ripe serviceberries, and found some huckleberries, raspberries, and a few sparse handfuls of elderberries and strawberries. His fingers were sticky and purple, his touchy stomach protested the glut of blueberries a little, and the heat and the general malaise of not drinking nearly enough to stave off the first prickles of withdrawal meant he was exhausted. But for all that, he felt oddly content.

Seeing she looked as shot as him, they paused on the old cut. It had been a road, once, leading over the mountain towards the south, and the cracked pavement was still there beneath the growth of shrubs. No trees had pushed through the thick layer of asphalt, though, and so it remained a narrow bare strip leading down into the valley. This high up the slope, there was a good view of the work going on below. The place still looked somewhat desolate, scraped bare of anything but workers’ tents and a few rickety shacks that the likes of Rooba had thrown up in a hurry, and the huge pile of rubble only made the grubby, depressing slag heap at the west end of town look all the worse. But even now the framework for buildings rose, timber skeletons against the sky. “Progress,” Johanna noted, stretching her legs out, massaging her left knee with her hand. “Paylor says they’ll turn this into some big medical center. Hospital, make medications, all of it.”

“We needed something like that in the east anyway, since Three’s all the way on the west coast.” He looked towards the southwest of the valley, at the dark and oily wisps of smoke spewing still from the mouth of Dunstan’s Mine, the steel gates that the workers must have put up to keep people away. He shrugged. “Not like Panem ever really needed coal, except to manufacture steel. It was just to give Twelve busy work.” Useless, risky coal mining--no wonder they’d been the smallest and poorest district, superfluous in virtually every way.

“Well,” she said, looking at the smoke herself, “your mine’s pretty decisively closed anyway.”

“Not the only mine we had. It’s the one my ma worked, and Katniss’ pa too, but there are another half-dozen within a couple hours’ train ride that others worked. Anthracite mines up north too, near the Thirteen border, where they always mined a few weeks of the summer.” He nodded towards the burning mine. “They’ve got a mine up there in the anthracite country--Centralia, they called the town--that they said burned for about a century even before the Fall.” Two hundred years now, and apparently no sign of burning itself out yet. “They evacuated everyone from the town once the fire spread. Let it go to ruins.”

“At least you’ll all rebuild here.”

He smiled wryly. She wasn’t from coal country, didn’t understand, but that was OK. “Let’s hope we’re not building right over ground that’ll get consumed in a mine fire.” He shrugged and added, “But that’s worries for long away. Dunstan’s is close to ten miles from the town center. If the fire doesn’t burn out, it’ll take a long, long time to get here. Must have been other mine fires out there that didn’t do anything to the town.”

She reached into her rucksack and pulled out a few more blueberries, popping them in her mouth one by one. “Too bad we don’t have jars for making jam.” 

“I do,” he said, and she must have heard the hesitation in his voice. “A whole load, up in the attic. Ma got ‘em sent. I imagine she planned to do a hell of a lot of canning that summer and fall since she could afford to buy the food.” She wouldn’t have been able to think like a Capitolite, that if she wanted strawberries in the middle of winter, she could simply expect them to be available, forced in Eleven’s greenhouses. Couldn’t shake that upbringing about preserving food in a time of plenty, for the lean months. “It’s up there with a whole load of stuff that got there the next train delivery after the funeral.” She glanced away from him, down towards the valley, and nodded. “Might as well put them to good use for once,” he went on hurriedly. Better that they not sit there another twenty-six years, another painful reminder. Ma would have been happy that they’d been put to use finally.

“It’s blueberries with you, isn’t it?” she asked, amusement tinging her voice. “I noticed you right went after ‘em like a hungry honeybear.”

Still hot in the summer sun, he felt himself blushing again, but grateful to her all the same for changing the subject. “Like you didn’t chow through half the raspberries we found, darlin’.”

“ _Honeybear_ ,” she mocked. “And hey, at least it means I have some kind of appetite. Yay.”

He rolled his eyes, pushing up to his feet and reaching for his backpack. “We should start heading back. Get a few snares set for Rooba down in the hollows.” He still remembered how to set them and where. Hopefully his hands would cooperate, but they’d stayed steady enough today, though the fatigue setting in might not help. Well, if it didn’t happen today, they could set them early tomorrow morning, right after taking their maintenance doses to stave off the worst of withdrawal.

“Yeah, OK.” She grabbed her own bag. “It’s nice out here, though,” she said, so soft that he barely heard it. With that, he nodded to himself, knowing they’d be back, and grateful at the idea. He couldn’t say he’d felt entirely good, given his body’s protests and the lingering memories, but he felt far more peaceful out here than he’d expected, and that was a gift.


	5. Chapter 5

He’d always liked the autumn, in truth. For some it meant the close of things, the end of the bright days of summer and a slow slide into winter. But for him, as a child, it meant the fall dances in a last burst of community before everyone hunkered down in their houses for the winter. As a young teenager, it meant putting the specter of another reaping behind him safely. And after his Games, it meant the longest span possible between himself and another Games, and leading into the months where everyone became something of a hermit over the winter, so he was no longer the weird one staying shut up in his house. He’d always hated summer these past twenty-six years, and even spring brought dread because there was no promise of renewal there in the green of the leaves, the melting snow, the yellow dandelions that sprung up as weeds inevitably did. Most people saw fall as the promise of inevitable months of death, decay, and darkness. Spring became that time for him, but autumn instead meant a calm, forgiving sort of peace. 

So to sit out on the porch with the kids and Johanna, on a drowsy warm September morning, drinking coffee and eating breakfast, felt damn good. “Rooba makes a good sausage,” Katniss commented, scraping the last of the eggs off her plate.

She’d landed on her feet, Rooba, building a pen and keeping pigs and goats and chickens near the site where her father Callum had once had his butcher shop. Did brisk business now, given the ever-hungry workers down there. “We’re running low on maple syrup,” Peeta said with a glum twist to his mouth. 

“That’s not maple syrup they send us,” Johanna said with a dismissive grunt. “That’s sugar syrup with some maple-flavored chemical they cooked up in a Three lab.” She put her plate down, crossing her legs and nodding out towards the mountains. “I’ll mark the location of some of the maples--you’ve got sugar maples for sure, maybe some of the good-looking blacks and reds, and we could hit up the birches too. February, maybe March, we’ll have us a good syrup boil.” He couldn’t help but note with interest that she made plans for that long in the future, talking about this place like she intended to stay. It was a question never again asked, but she was free to leave at any time if she wanted. If she could so casually talk about being here late in the winter for something so mundane as making maple syrup, that meant something, didn’t it?

“Pa took me out to tap trees,” Katniss said. 

“That how you knew about spiles?” Johanna asked her, a look of awkward remembrance crossing her face. 

Katniss nodded, looking out towards the hills herself, a distant look on her face. “But that was once or twice, when I was really little. He never got around to teaching me all about it. And we never could take much. Couldn’t exactly walk through the fence with a half-dozen buckets of sap, right? So we’d end up tapping only one or two trees and pouring the sap into a couple of flasks we could tuck away in his backpack, boil it down and it’d make such a mess of the kitchen. Even if we did that for a month or so every Sunday we went into the woods, it only ever gave a couple little jars of actual syrup. It never lasted past summer. Ma would make us all pancakes on Sunday mornings...” She shook her head, falling silent, shoulders hunching over. Haymitch looked away too, remembering long-ago days with Burt, how it had been Briar that taught them about tapping maples.

“It’s gotta be late winter,” Johanna told her, something in her voice softening a bit, probably trying to jolt the girl out of the descending spiral of her memories. “When the days get above freezing, but the nights are still below. It gets the sap running. And it’s something like thirty-five, forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, so not surprising you got only a smidge of it.”

“How do you do it in Seven?”

“Big thing for us, the syrup boil, right before it’s thawed enough to go to the lumber camps.” She shrugged. “Big enough that we did all the boiling outdoors in huge troughs. Of course, the Capitol would confiscate almost all the syrup we made to send it to One for them to put in pretty bottles and sell as a luxury good. But we all got to keep a quart per family each year. My dad would make it into a huge batch of maple candy. That made it last longer than eating it at breakfast would, especially the way Bern--my brother--would pour on the syrup.” She looked down the hill the other way, towards the construction site, where the houses now popped up like mushrooms. “Might be enough folks here by then to do a big boil. With the houses coming in, and the government offering them for free, there’ll be people here to take a chance on Twelve.”

The hopeless dreamers wanting to be part of some great symbolic rebuilding, and the hopeless ones with nowhere else to go, he figured. “We’ll see,” he said, reaching for their plates, heading for the kitchen to put them in the dishwasher.

Katniss came in then. “You’re heading out today?” She nodded towards the woods.

“Snares to check,” he answered, carefully sticking the forks in the silverware compartment. “Might start picking some of the apples too, they looked pretty ripe last week.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Any reason you’re not out there too, sweetheart?”

She glowered at him for a moment, but then looked down and away. “Too many memories right now,” she said bluntly. “And I went out there for two reasons: to find food, and when I needed some peace.”

“You’ve got better solace right here now, though.” He tried to say it as gently as possible, so she wouldn’t think he was mocking the two of them. He couldn’t resist a wry smile. “Though you might need some time away from him now and again, you’ll find.” Young lovers, so utterly wrapped up in each other. Adorable and saccharine and hilarious all at once.

She cleared her throat, tapped her left foot nervously on the floor. “You ever get there? With…”

“Briar.” He’d never told her the name, not back there among the ruins of Thirteen’s surface buildings. But then, Katniss hadn’t asked. “No. We had only a little while, really. Still totally caught up in that lovestruck phase.”

“What about Johanna?” she blurted.

He lifted an eyebrow. “What about Johanna?” he returned blandly.

“I mean, aren’t you two…together?” She leaned back against the counter, arms crossed, staring at him.

He couldn’t resist a laugh as he slammed the dishwasher and turned the dial to start it. “Sweetheart, if you two ever put any time into worrying about my love life, that’s time wasted. We’re friends. We play chess in the evenings or watch lousy television. We go out in the woods and the clothes stay on. Very sexy.” He wasn’t about to explain it all to an eighteen-year-old girl discovering her sexual hungers for the first time and all that sense of wonder to it. That was something long since destroyed for him. Sex didn’t mean anything and never would, and Johanna knew that, because it was the same for her. He didn’t imagine she’d fucked around in Capitol clubs for fun. There was far too much of an air of desperation and anger to it. He didn’t miss sex. He sure as hell didn’t miss the patrons. Sometimes he didn't even miss being touched at all, and the thought of it terrified him. But it went back and forth, and the days of yearning outweighed the moments of revulsion. If he missed anything, it would have been those long-ago days, before everything got ruined. Not just Briar’s kisses, or those first wonder-filled, fumbling explorations of each other’s bodies even as they knew they couldn’t take it nearly as far as they wanted, but it was also Ash’s fierce hugs, Jonas and Burt roughhousing with him, his ma’s gentle hand on his cheek. 

Nobody touched him. Nobody wanted to, and he didn’t blame them, given what a pathetic wreck he’d become. The two hugs he’d had from Katniss, after her Games and then again in the Thirteen ruins, were in moments she was overwrought, and Peeta wasn’t there for her to hug. They would never have happened casually, never become an everyday normality. But that, and those two nights with Johanna, were the most anyone had deliberately touched him, meaning a kindness, in years. 

But there was a certain comfort to what he and Johanna did have, a quiet contentment. Nights where he would have stayed up far too late, caught in the snares of his ghosts and his guilt, clutching a bottle of liquor, he spent instead with her, down in the parlor.

Not that it changed everything. He drank less, keeping busy as he did with chess and television and cooking and walking in the woods, and having her there for company. Less than in a long, long time, but he couldn’t ever stop. The bad days--and bad nights--still happened often enough, and alcohol was the only thing that really worked when it got that terrible. And even when it was good enough he didn’t need to drink to blot things out, and he managed to forget for a while, his body betrayed him and sharply reminded him. The tremors and nausea would start, and he’d grab the bottle to drink away the physical hurt, the same way he drank away the unbearable pain in his mind. Alcohol had him on a short tether and it always would. It was exactly the same for her with the morphling, and by now he could tell when she suffered and needed to take a hit of it. But at least they understood and accepted that limitation, and in the meantime, things stood a little brighter, a little more bearable. “And you and him?” he asked casually, pretty certain of the answer. Her awkward expression said plenty. “When you’re getting close to that point, come see me. I’ve got contraceptive injections. Aurelius says probably best that it’s you, since it might react badly with Peeta’s antipsy--uh, his medications.”

“Why did he--”

“I’m your guardian, and neither of you is of legal age, so he discussed it with me and insisted on sending me the meds on the last train.” He shrugged awkwardly, reaching up to scratch his cheek. “Look, you want to talk to him directly about it, fine by me. I figure you’re old enough to have endured what you have, you’re old enough to handle your own sex life.” He’d been even younger than her when he’d been initiated into a whole world of sexual horrors. “And I told him that. He’s willing to deal with you direct, since I gave him my permission.”

He could practically sense her chafing at being reduced to a child by the bureaucracy, and couldn’t blame her. “I’ll talk to him and deal with it myself,” she said, shaking her head awkwardly. “No offense. But I don’t need you involved in…”

“Cheerfully agreed.” He gave her a wry grin. “It’s your business. Just...don’t be reckless about it. You’re gonna start sleeping together, you need to be responsible about it.” 

She nodded at that, and he turned to go. “Maybe you should talk to him, though. You and Johanna both.” Her voice was quiet, so he strained to hear it over the gurgle and thrum of the dishwasher. “Aurelius, I mean.” She made a face. “I thought he was full of crap too, but...it’s helped me.”

He shook his head. Aurelius kept pestering both of them about it too. But the shrink was for people who had a prayed of fixing their problems. People who were a bit cracked, but not shattered to bits. “That’s my business,” he told her, trying to keep the warning tone out of his voice, but she’d get the point anyway. 

Walking back to his house--their house, was it theirs by now?--with Johanna, it was quiet since the geese had left. They’d mowed the thick, tall grass down and cleared out the pond. Apparently the busted wing on the male wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t fly away south to escape the winter. Couldn’t blame them, really. But he missed the two noisy, assertive shitbags all the same, even if he couldn’t bear to name them, because he’d always suspected he’d lose them somehow. “They may well come back in the spring,” Johanna said, obviously figuring out where his mind had wandered. “They’re smart bastards, they know you’ll spoil them rotten.”

“Maybe.” He wouldn’t count on it. Getting hopes up only invited getting fucked over. He wouldn’t plan to ever see either of those two again, simply hoped that next year would bring them far more luck with their young than this one had. They were tough birds, those two. They’d be fine. “Let’s get a walk in, huh? See if we’ve got anything in the snares to trade to Rooba, and go pick some of those apples.” He could go for some apples, really, and at least out there in the woods there might be some sense of peace and contentment, which was more than he could say for talking to a shrink.

~~~~~~~~~~

It seemed like she couldn’t get her fill of apple, the grainy crisp crunch as she bit through the skin, the explosion of sweet juice. She hadn’t had apples to eat last year, not real ones anyway. Only whatever canned shit they served in the Thirteen infirmary, given applesauce like a snot-nosed baby for weeks on end as they rebuilt her emaciated body.

But this wasn’t last autumn, trapped in a hospital bed. She was strong again. This was crisp autumn air and blazing leaves nodding in the breeze like ripples of wildfire in a canopy overhead, all the brighter against the dreary overcast sky. The smell of loam and wild things, the sound of the wind through the leaves and the calling birds and the rustle of animals in the undergrowth, the taste of a fresh apple on her tongue. It felt like home, the best days of it. Climbing the trees to reach the best fruit at the top and handing apples down to Haymitch, the two of them talking excitedly about the pies and turnovers and dried apples and hopefully no applesauce at all. Apple butter maybe, she could teach them how to make that, and the thought of fresh apple butter on homemade bread was practically better than any orgasm she could remember. 

That all shattered as the first raindrop hit her hand, in the web of flesh between thumb and forefinger, where she still clutched the apple core as she gnawed down the last of her third apple to the very pips. For a moment she stared at it, and the wind stirred through the leaves in that abrupt gust that spoke of rain. Her head shot up, eyes staring between the branches, seeing the grey clouds overhead. Even as she spoke, she pushed up to her feet, grabbing blindly for one of the two rucksacks chock full of apples. Even unsettled as she was, she wouldn’t abandon food they’d worked so hard to get. “Weather’s turned, we should get back,” trying to keep her voice even, but her heart raced and she felt like she might throw up all the apple she’d gobbled down in such a hurry.

No point trying to pretend around Haymitch. The man had an absurd ability to see through layers and layers of bullshit. Besides, given how he’d been the first to show up to see her in the infirmary after her failure on the Block, they must have told him the details. He knew damn well about her issue with water, but never pushed, never prodded.

A few more drops hit her as she headed down the path and she suppressed the instinctive shudder working its way down her spine, trying to keep as calm as she could. A few little drops of rain. She could handle this. She kept walking, conscious of Haymitch right behind her, but giving him no more thought than that, focusing only on the homeward path and trying to quell the anxiety and fear stirring within her like a prowling forest cat, ready to pounce.

But the sky opened up halfway back, right as they reached the lake, and suddenly the few drips became a roar, pouring down on her. Cold water, drenching her in moments, and she gasped instinctively at the shock of it hitting her face, sucking it in and coughing, lungs burning, and that was all it took. The terror unfolded, expanded rapidly through her consciousness, grasping vines of it winding through and through her mind and choking her off from any light, any rational thought, leaving only the suffocating darkness. _Please please please not again not the wires._

Sensing someone near her, she managed enough realization to see that she wasn’t in the cell, she’d somehow escaped, but one of her jailors was right there. She started running before he could grab her and drag her back to the Detention Center, back to the sensation of being taken right to the very edge of drowning and then cruelly pulled back out to whimper and gasp for air, and then the sizzle of electricity and the white-hot jolt in her brain. “Fuck you,” she half-growled, half-gasped, pounding her way down the slope, barely looking where she was going, thinking only of escape as she fled through the rain, still soaking her. She heard him behind her, yelling her name, and that only made her run all the faster. He couldn’t catch her, he couldn’t drag her back...he couldn’t complete what he hadn't in the arena this time, pin her down to the ground and yank at her clothes while making leering promises about giving the sponsors a real show...couldn’t shame her, humiliate her, reduce her to nothing except a plaything to be toyed with and tormented and thrown away eventually when he killed her for the Capitol and the world to see.

Her boots slipped and she went down with an awkward twist of her left ankle, feeling a flare of pain, landing facedown in the dead leaves and mud. Scrabbling back to her feet, forcing the ankle to bear her weight as she gathered herself up again and pushed off. She didn’t hear him, didn’t see him immediately as she glanced fearfully up the slope. She forced herself to try to calm down, shoving the monster back into its cell as best she could, trying to find the ability to think a bit more clearly. If she kept crashing through the woods like a wounded bear sow, he’d hear her and find her. No, best to hide and make him come to her--get out of the rain and the unnerving feel of it--and be ready when that happened. She’d done that in the arena, once the darkness receded. Then she saw the stout concrete square by the lakeshore, a small structure barely larger than her bedroom back home, alongside a handful of other dirty cement slabs that must have once been the foundation for other cabins. But the door worked when she turned the knob, and she stepped inside. Three windows gone and the rain trickled in through them in a steady patter, but the fourth was still there, yellowed and cracked, but the ground beneath was dry. Dropping the rucksack, collapsing gratefully in a heap, she huddled back against the wall, trying to take a minute to compose herself.

Things faded back into easy, clear focus rather than the sharp, brittle-edged crazy kaleidoscope she’d been viewing it all through. Not a guard chasing her, or Clark from Five, only Haymitch. Though that realization cut away the last cobwebby strands of terror, shame and embarrassment washed right in to replace it. She didn’t much want to face him at that moment. Stupid weak little fool, unable to withstand even a rain shower without fleeing in a panic. She could find her way back after this, and if he was smart, he’d stay the hell away from her.

There was a woodpile in the corner, stacked by the little fireplace, made of smooth round stones cemented together, and obviously someone else had been here far more recently than the Dark Days, because a box of White Swan kitchen matches sat in the basket of shredded kindling beside the logpile. Shivering now from her cold and sodden clothes as much as the crash of adrenaline, she made her way over, and it was the work of a few moments to start a fire. Good, dry firewood too, unlike the stuff curing back down at the Village from her vigorous and regular chopping efforts, so it would catch quickly. Sitting on the cement slab of the hearth, feeding the fire carefully, she watched the flame grow, wondering if she actually felt any warmth or if it was all psychological at this point. Her clothes and hair dripped steadily, and the mud was all over her hands and clothes, hair and face, but nothing to clean off with for now, and rubbing at it only smeared it in more. Knees drawn to her chest, she bowed her head to her knees for a moment, suddenly unspeakably tired. So this was what she’d come to in life. Sitting out in the ruins of a concrete cabin in the Twelve woods, mud-daubed, exhausted, injured, and soaked after totally freaking out in an ordinary autumn rain. Mad, feral, more animal instinct than human. A woman nobody wanted and few even tolerated. 

Fuck, how she wanted the needle in that moment, so much that the craving was almost a physical pain, and the throb in her ankle only encouraged her, luring her with the promise of how the morphling would dull that pain, dull all the pain. Weeks of trying to cut down, find other ways to get by, and all it took was one bad moment. She’d trade it all now for the morphling, because she was that weak, that broken, and she’d never be all right again. The flames blurred as she stared at them, tears hot against her cold cheeks. _This isn’t living. They took everything. I’m nothing. I’m nothing._ Just an empty skin and skeleton where a soul used to be. 

Sunk that deep into physical and mental misery, when she heard the heavy tread behind her, she immediately looked over her shoulder to round on Haymitch. Even as she started yelling, she saw he was as mud-coated as her, the way he gingerly held his left arm against his body and realized he’d fallen as well in the slippery conditions, trying to catch up to her. But the words started their way out and as usual, she almost couldn’t stop herself. “Why are you even here? Couldn’t just let me run off and go where nobody would find me? You and your pathetic savior complex, all those poor dead Twelve kiddies you couldn’t save, and guess what? _You can’t save me,_ and you said we’d earned the right to go to hell if we wanted, right? So why are you here? You think some stupid apple picking’s going to save our poor little souls, make us clean again, make life worth living? This isn’t living, this is limping along and,” she flung a stick of firewood at one of the walls away from both of them, hearing the thud as it hit with a solid clatter, “bleeding with every step, and I’m so damn sick of it!”

By the end her voice was practically a shriek, grating raw on her vocal chords, but she didn’t even care. Drained, she told him, feeling almost numb now, “If I ever decide I want to walk off into those woods, don’t you fucking well stop me.” The idea took root in her mind, springing up full blown from the seed that had lurked beneath the soil, well hidden but now undeniable. Was that really what she wanted? Even as she said it, some part of her pulled back from the idea, but not enough to call it aghast horror. She stared back at the fire, hands cradled in her lap, chafing them against each other for the warmth of it, feeling the mud slowly drying into the cracks and lines of her skin. 

He sat down heavily, let out a soft groan that sounded like pain as he still held his left arm stiffly, as her eyes went to him. Wiping the rain from his eyes with the back of his hand, leaving another streak of mud across his forehead, he shook his head once, twice, in a slow motion that would have seemed sarcastic if she didn’t suspect weariness was the cause. “You think you’re the only one who’s ever thought about giving up? Hell, Nulla Clearly took a walk into these woods in the middle of winter, and I don’t know how many times I’d lie there at night over all these years, thinking maybe she was smarter than me to admit that was the only way out. But I couldn’t at first because I worried Snow might take it out on someone else. And then...if any Twelve kid had even a ghost of a chance, no fill-in Career mentor would care enough to fight for them. Maeda--Maeda Torres, she was from Four--was practically worthless for me until the sponsors actually came looking for her a week or so into it. And I got stuck with Maeda, because Nulla wasn’t there, because she called it quits. I wasn’t gonna do that.”

So this was how it was. Too tired to even keep silent anymore or pretend, and the words came like a torrent in a way they never could with Aurelius or Annie or Katniss or Peeta. Her throat felt tight, eyes itching and blurring. “And I guess I stuck around at first because I wouldn’t let Snow win. And then because you and I both know Blight couldn’t deal with dying kids, and Cedrus was getting too old for it, the sponsors wouldn’t pay him any mind anymore. And maybe...if I brought one home alive, Seven wouldn’t still think I was a heartless bitch who’d throw anyone into the buzzsaw.” She’d never admitted that to anyone before, but his soft rumble of acknowledgment told her that he understood, and she’d known all along that he’d had something to prove to Twelve as well. “But it’s not really living if the only reason you’ve got is some debt to other people, is it?”

“Johanna,” and something in his voice, oddly soft but infinitely sad, hit her right in that aching, fathomless grief and made the tears well up all the harder, “ain’t like we’ve been living, ever since they took away everyone that mattered. We’ve been surviving out of habit and obligation and fear, that’s all.”

“Others managed to make something better of it. Maybe Katniss and Peeta will.” Why was she arguing about this anyway? He’d said it so succinctly, almost perfectly. They’d been walking dead for years, both of them. “But we won't.” The drunk and the junkie; the Capitol ruined them both well and good.

“Were we really thinking that somehow we beat the Capitol and it magically turns into this beautiful, happy life we’ve missed all these years?”

Tears slid down her cheeks again even she laughed until it hurt. “What, all those sweet little dreams about how I’d find me a nice lumberjack hubby to keep me warm on winter nights, who ignores that I can’t even get caught in the rain now without freaking out? That I say shitty things first off and bother regretting it later? That I _always_ have to be on top?”

“He’d get along real well with my wife. Sweet little soul who’d think all I need is someone who can care enough to fix me. Try her best to not feel hurt when I go off by myself because I’ve been alone so fucking long that sometimes I can’t stand to be around even one person. Who wouldn’t feel rejected that I can fuck her till she’s screaming my name but never make love to her, or when I wake up screaming or crying like a fucking five year old and turn away from her. Who wouldn’t be bitter that it’s the bottle I give the problems to, not her, because she can’t fathom the shit that’s in my head, and I’d be damn glad she can’t even imagine it. She’d end up hating me, once she figures out that love and good intentions ain’t enough, that I’m never gonna be right again...and she’d be right.”

They’d never said any of that so openly. But there didn’t seem much point in pretense anymore in that moment. They both knew how bad off they were, and it felt good in a strange way to finally admit it. She gave him a small smile. He nodded, returning the expression, and the fact that someone was there, looking at her, seeing her even as pathetic as she felt in that moment, was a small dab of balm. “Maybe so. But you were right to stick around--nobody could have saved both of them two years ago like you did. None of it would have happened without that.”

“We couldn’t have made it all happen without you in the arena last summer. Keeping Beetee and Wiress alive, and then defending the group. If they’d died in there, we’d both be sitting in our houses with four more dead kids in the 76th Games.” 

“So we were right to hang around for a while trying to help the tributes. Yippee. Big damn heroes, the two of us.”

“Yeah. We saved the world, huh?” The dry sarcasm in his voice as he said it made her smile in spite of herself.

She looked right into his grey eyes, smiling back. Something within her had eased, pressure released. “But not for us.”

“No.”

She nodded in acknowledgement of that. “Are you actually planning to do anything?” she asked him bluntly. “It’s not like you have tributes to worry about anymore.” There was a difference between sometimes thinking about calling it quits, and actually seriously thinking about it.

He shook his head, pushing his still-wet hair back out of his eyes when it flopped damply across his brow from the gesture. “It’s not an option right now. Katniss is getting better but she’s still too easy to push back into a funk. You know there’s still days she disappears and not even Peeta knows where she’s gone. And Peeta’s better on the hijacking rage episodes, but it’s touch and go. If he ever loses control and she’s the only one there...” He chewed his lower lip for a moment, spreading his hands in a helpless shrugging gesture. “They need more time for that. Plus, I’m their guardian until they’re legally adults. He’s nineteen next February, and her in May. It’s not like they need _me_ as such, they never have, and they’ll get by without me just fine someday, but there’s a use for me still. I can’t walk out on that.” 

She looked back at him, and nodded. “Fair enough.” He hadn’t fully answered the question, but she wasn’t Aurelius or anyone else, to demand an answer. Seeing the bright sunshine streaming in through the windows, she pushed up off the ground, relieved that the ankle would bear her weight. Peering out one of the busted-out windows, the sky looked clear enough to not expect another cloudburst immediately. “Rain’s stopped. Let’s get back.” Taking a minute to prod the small fire apart so it would burn itself out, they grabbed the rucksacks again and headed back home. She was glad once again of the route from the fence that avoided the town and the bustle there, even if the steeper ground towards the path up to the Village pinged the twisted ankle a bit. 

By the time they got back, the sun sat low in the sky, but it was Tuesday, one of three days of the week where there was no dinner with Katniss and Peeta. It had done all of them some good to not have too much togetherness. So they wouldn’t have to answer anxious or irritable questions from those two on where they’d been to miss the meal, and and that was a relief.

Peeling off her muddy boots and the door, carefully bracing the ankle as she did so, she felt utterly gross. Her clothes hadn’t exactly dried on her, but they’d reached the stage where the muddy parts felt tacky and clay-like, and the wet parts were still a bit clammy. From the look of Haymitch, he was no better. “You want any dinner?” he asked, scratching idly at his cheek. A few flakes of the greyish dried mud fell to the hallway floor like dirty snow.

“Nope. I’m still pretty full of apples,” she told him, shaking her head. Something about the whole afternoon put her off her appetite anyway. If she woke in the middle of the night, ravenous, she could go slap together a sandwich.

“OK. You can have the bathroom,” he told her. “I can use the shower downstairs.” 

“Bring up some ice, would you? Probably ought to get it on your arm too.” Damn good thing the freezer worked now. Carefully climbing the stairs, she got into the bathroom, stripping off the dirty clothes and rolling them into a ball. Glancing at her ankle, it looked a bit swollen, but not angrily bruised or deformed. Morphling would take care of the pain well enough. Sitting down on the edge of the tub, running the water and carefully sticking her hand under it to make sure it wasn’t too cold, she started the usual process--hand in first, then slowly running her arm through it, first one and then the other. So long as she stuck to this careful, gradual ritual, kept the water warm and only washed her face and hair carefully with a washcloth, and locked the door so that even her unconscious instincts assured her nobody could come in and shove her under, she could manage this. Feet in the water next, water rippling in turbulent eddies around her ankles as the tub continued to fill, letting herself feel that sensation, telling herself it was safe. Slowly, carefully, lowering herself down to kneel in the water next, and then eventually sit, letting it wash over her body, and her heart still skipped along a bit faster, but it was bearable.

But a few greyish swirls of color laced their way through the steaming water even before she picked up the washcloth, and she sighed. No point sitting in filthy water and pretending it did any good towards getting clean. A shower really would be easier with the mud--but she started to shudder at the thought of it, and forcibly shoved the notion out of her mind. Pulling the plug, draining the water out, she started to run the water again, dipping the washcloth under the stream of it and scrubbing the worst of the mud off, rinsing it, and repeating. 

Her hair was mud-spattered enough to need more than a wipedown, which she finally had to admit when the dirty trickles of water kept running down into the tub. She’d need to scrub it, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Haymitch to do it, and sit there beside her and freak her out even more by his simply being a presence. Somehow, she managed it, eyes squeezed shut tightly against more than the burn of shampoo, head tipped back to keep the water off her face as much as possible. Filling a cup of water under the spout and pouring it over her soapy hair, over and over, biting down on the fleshy part of her left hand around the base of her thumb to keep herself from screaming out loud, shaking and swearing muffled curses.

But she survived it, until her hair was squeaky clean. That felt like a little victory after the cold shock of terror and shame at how she’d reacted to being caught in the rain earlier. To reward herself, she filled up the tub again and scrubbed down until her skin was pink from the heat and the terrycloth, and the worst of the aches soaked out of her muscles. Even the ankle felt better, but after getting back to her room, she slapped the icepack Haymitch had left there over it, tying it in place with a bandana. She took the morphling for good measure. It would kill the pain, and she deserved it after the lousy time out in the rain and the mental exhaustion of talking over with Haymitch how truthfully shitty life really was.

That kept her awake, after she turned out the light. The notion of him suddenly gone--the one reliable person in her world she could more or less trust. It gnawed at her, and his half-answer about sticking around for the sake of the kids wasn’t enough. Slipping out of bed, she padded down the hallway to his room, seeing from the glow in the crack at the bottom of the door that a lamp was still on. No surprise. She knew from going to the bathroom in the middle of the night that he often slept with the light on. Whether that was personal preference or just falling asleep exhausted in the wee hours before he could turn it out, she wasn’t sure. 

She knocked, and the prompt, “Yeah,” came back. It wasn’t exactly an explicit invitation to come in, but she took it as one anyway. She tried the doorknob, and found it locked. So apparently it was like her need to lock the bathroom door when she bathed. “Gimme a second.” The door swung open and he stepped back from where he’d blocked the door to open it, allowing her access.

She smelled the mingled scents of the lemon soap they both used, and a whiff of whiskey, seeing a tumbler with ice on the nightstand. “You’ve got your nightcap, I’ve got mine,” he told her with a smirk as he shut the door behind her. His eyes weren’t glassy, which told her he might have taken the edge off, but he wasn’t drunk by any means.

“No argument. It was a rough day,” she answered. Not sure how to go about asking, she found herself blurting, “So how would you do it? If you were planning it?”

“What _is_ it about midnight that turns a mind so fucking morbid?” he muttered, lips pressed tight and eyes wide in a quizzical expression. “Why does it matter?”

She didn’t know what to say. Why the hell was it so important to know anyway? She’d yelled at him that he’d best not stop her, and she’d give him the same courtesy. But it would be good to know, to prepare. “Nice to know what to expect in terms of cleanup,” she quipped.

“Johanna,” he said warningly, sitting down heavily on the bed and taking another sip of the whiskey.

“Haymitch,” she returned his tone exactly. But then she turned away from the mutual sarcasm, to the serious heart of the matter. “I just want to know. You know I won’t stop you or try to talk you out of it, if that’s what you want. But you o--” Dammit, she didn’t want to tell him he owed her, giving how insanely defensive and masochistic Twelve people were about the notion of owing anyone _anything_. “Don’t...just up and do it on me,” she said, hearing the gruff edge in her voice. “I’ve lost too many people, all of a sudden. Give me time to...” To adjust? To say goodbye? All of it, really.

“If I ever did it, there won’t be any mess,” he told her abruptly, putting the tumbler back down and capping the whiskey. “Like any of you needs yet another dead body to deal with? I’d go out in winter. Like Nulla did. Into the snow--I hear it’s pretty easy, as dying goes.”

They both remembered the 72nd; all the kids that froze to death out there in the snow with no fires. Seven and Twelve’s tributes were all dead by the next morning. Amaranth Cooper survived and lost four toes and two fingers to frostbite. Johanna killed her in the initial scrum at the Cornucopia, trying to keep Wiress safe. “It didn’t look so bad. Worse ways to go,” she agreed, trying to shut out the memory of Amaranth’s dead, wide-staring brown-black eyes. He’d never explained much, but she knew the 51st, Brutus’s year and Haymitch’s first mentoring year, had been a snow arena too, and a brutal one. 

“They say you go numb quick enough and then fall asleep forever. Nice and quiet. No fuss. Pretty painless. And finally sleeping well for once, that’s tempting,” she saw how he tried to smile and make it a flippant joke, but failed. “I’ve maybe earned that much, haven’t it?” An oddly plaintive note entered his voice, and she could tell it wasn’t merely a rhetorical question. He honestly was asking her. “To have it not hurt.”

This was how fucked up everything got, broken and devastated, twisted by guilt and loathing and rejection. Beaten down to the point where even wondering if they possibly deserved to suffer in dying, or be fated to continue to suffer by continuing living, was a genuine concern. After all, better people than them had died horrible deaths, so why should they get away easily? But he’d asked. And as he watched her carefully, looking for her reaction, she wasn’t sure why he’d come to her of all people for absolution or damnation, but obviously he wanted it. “Yeah,” she told him, remembering how hard he’d struggled to do the right thing all these years, no matter what it cost him. “You have.” He shut his eyes for a moment, and nodded slightly, as if an invisible but massive weight had fallen from his shoulders.

“I’m not planning anything right now,” he told her, voice quiet. “Surviving’s gotten to be a hard habit to break.”

So he’d thought about it, in his usual thorough fashion, enough to have figured out all the angles, but that wasn’t the same thing as intending to do it. At least, not now. A wave of relief went through her at hearing it. Maybe they’d find some way to stumble on. It wouldn’t be delirious sun-drenched rapture; those pockets of darkness always cast a long shadow of influence, but at least in the last couple months here, she’d been better off. She’d used the morphling less, even if she’d likely never be able to stop. But she’d found other ways to keep her mind busy sometimes, and she might get pissed off with any of the three of them at any given time, but at least they were there, and they’d taken her in, and made her belong. She couldn’t see being happy, but maybe less desperate was good enough. Looking at him, still feeling the rippling echoes of that desolate loneliness they shared, all the honesty they’d put out on the table today, suddenly it wasn’t enough to turn around and say goodnight, and leave him to drink until he fell asleep with the light on. There had to be more, and maybe she could do something about it.

Before she could rethink the impulse, she’d sat down beside him with a creaking protest of the bedsprings, leaned in, and kissed him. Clumsy, fingers knotting for a second in the soft, well-worn fabric of his t-shirt, wanting to cling there so that he couldn’t push her away and make her feel the cold slap of his rejection again, but at the same time, feeling sick at the idea of forcing him to endure her, like he’d endured so many others. Stupid impulse, moving ahead of her again, but words--dammit, words stuck in her throat like a badly-swallowed bone, and she’d always been more inclined to demonstration through action.

Different now than before, because she could think of how he could make her feel, he was still good at sex, and he could help make her forget even as it would make her feel alive, make her body more than a tired construct that did her bidding and that she regularly stuck with a needle so her mind could bear it all. But it had expanded beyond that narrow circle of focus on what she needed, and alongside wanting that feeling, there was the notion that maybe, just maybe, she could give him something by it as well. He deserved to feel something besides sorrow and guilt and mere painful endurance. The warmth of him, sitting mere inches away, and carefully waiting in the aftermath of that kiss, seemed like too much, and yet she couldn’t bear to move away. “It’s not…” She glanced down at her hands, not quite able to look him in the eyes at that moment. “We both know we’re screwed up when it comes to sex. It’s not like I’m after some romantic fantasy. But...don’t you ever lie awake at night sometimes thinking about how long it’s been since _anyone_ touched you?” She shook her head numbly. “I can’t even look at the two of them sometimes.” The little gestures they made without even thinking about it: holding hands, a quick hug, the slide of Katniss’ hand down Peeta’s back, Peeta’s hand on her shoulder. It crushed her down all the harder, having it flaunted in her face what she didn’t have, and never would. The ache fluttered in her chest at the thought of it. Being touched meant being acknowledged, it meant mattering to someone, it meant still being alive and human, rather than a damaged reject that nobody wanted.

She heard a soft rumble of acknowledgment from him. “I always had to look away from Annie and Finnick too.”

She glanced his way, sidelong, not fully committing yet to turning to him again. “I don’t know how to do that. The handholding and all that shit. Not anymore. Fucking...that’s all I’ve got left. All you’ve got too. But maybe with a friend, that’s enough. One less pain to numb out.”

Once, she’d thought she had that with Finnick, even as she imagined it becoming something more, a great love that would save them both. It sounded like what Haymitch had with Chantilly long ago was similar, but the pretty One victor had set the ground rules more firmly and kept it strictly friendly. But even that was rooted in desperation and trauma, trying to fuck away the worst of it by overlaying it with a friendly touch. Neither of them pretended they could make it go away now. The damage was done and this was simply making the best of what was left in the ashes. 

When he finally spoke up, it seemed like a non-sequitur at first. “When your entire sex life’s been in the span of a contraceptive shot each summer, you don’t think about it. We lucked out the last two times.” Yeah, they had, although she suspected her still-healing body wouldn’t conceive anyway. She hadn’t even really gotten her periods back until the middle of last winter. “So if we’re being rational--the last thing we need is to bring a kid into this. Our lives, I mean. Or for you to have to go to Four to end a pregnancy.”

“Not going to argue that point. You’ve still got the shots Aurelius sent for the kids, though. We could use that easy enough.”

“I’d have to take it. I don’t know how it interacts with morphling.” He gave off a caustic chuckle. “It works just great with liquor. Good thing. If it didn’t, I’d probably have a dozen little half-Capitol babies out there.” She tried to not wince at that idea. Forced fucking was bad enough. Forced breeding, blood forever mingled with those that had abused them, was even more sickening a notion. Maybe as a woman, it struck even harder. Men could walk away more easily, after all.

Sensing his mood diving into a darker place, and hers slid all too easily down that same chute, she pushed him. Him meandering about the practical realities didn’t exactly answer the question, and it plucked at her already frayed nerves, feeling curiously vulnerable. If he wanted to reject her again, best that he get to it. “So, what, is that a ‘yeah’ or a ‘Go the hell back to your own bedroom, Johanna’?” She turned then, staring at him directly, willing him to just say what he meant.

He smiled slightly. “Nobody’s ever slept in here except me.” Obviously it was a big thing, but she couldn’t figure out what he meant by it exactly. 

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes and put him in his place with some sharply chosen words. That was the defensiveness talking, and if she cut him carelessly, she’d probably chase him away for good. “Sure, I noticed we didn’t sleep together either time last year either. Fine, if you’re that territorial about your sleeping arrangements, we can fuck and then I’ll go back to my own bed. Or we can do it in my bed.”

The pressure of his hand on hers startled her, but instinctively, her fingers opened, to let his fingers lace with hers. She stared down at their joined hands, resting on her thigh against the faded green of her sleep shorts--raw gold and burnished olive, his scars and hers. Something within her breathed a sigh of relief. “You can stay. As long as you like,” he told her. “Because we’ve both been too damn lonely for too damn long.”


	6. Chapter 6

She woke to the sunlight through the curtains, blinking the sleep from her eyes as she saw the tracery of frost covering the window. “First frost,” she told Haymitch, as his arm tightened for a moment at her waist. Middle of November--right on schedule for that. “First snow’s not gonna be too far behind.” She felt him waking up, and she couldn’t help a chuckle as his hips pressed into her ass as he stirred. If nothing else, at least one part of him was wide awake. “What, the onset of winter gets you all excited?”

“Gotta take a piss,” he grumbled in that drowsy voice that told her he was still half asleep, sliding out from under the quilts and making her involuntarily squawk at the loss of his body heat next to her, plus the draft of cool air into the warm nest of bedcovers.

Hurriedly burrowing down deeper, she looked at the window again, marveling at the lace-like patterns the frost made. She heard the creak of the floorboards and felt the dip of the bed as he came back, though he must have been more awake now, as he eased back under the covers carefully, not losing much heat at all. Coming up behind her again, he kissed the nape of her neck, hand splayed on her stomach for a moment, but then moving upwards, cupping her breast. “So winter does get you randy,” she quipped, rolling over to face him, seeing that most of the sleepiness was gone from his eyes, regarding her with an intent interest.

He smirked briefly, but she leaned in and kissed him, hands already skimming beneath his t-shirt, pushing it up. He took the hint, scooting back a little, and she could hear the rustle of him dealing with his clothes. Tugging off her t-shirt and sleep pants while trying to stay cocooned safely beneath the covers wasn’t an easy task, but she managed it, and she moved back against him, reaching out greedily for him, feeling bare skin against hers, the tickle of chest hair against her breasts, his hands on her even as hers roved over him. He always seemed to run hot, maybe it was that bigger male body, but it was welcome on these colder nights.

Lying back against the pillows where they’d rolled, she put her hands flat against his chest as he settled over her, thighs gripping his hips to hold him there. There was that moment again where she paused and he sensed it, propped himself up, looking down at her face carefully, soberly, feeling her grip on his shoulders and the tension in her thighs, giving her a chance to say with her body or her words that it wasn’t a day that it would work, that she needed to be on top. But it was good this morning, and so her hands slipped from his shoulders to instead wrap her arms around his back, thighs easing open to let him sink down, drawing him in rather than pushing him away.

Shit, he felt good, big and warm, within and without, covering her, filling her. It wasn’t like they’d fucked every single night in the two months since they started, once they got over the awkwardness a week or two into it with that first instance when they were too tired and just fell asleep, still half-dressed. The sex had been a convenient excuse for her to stay, to sleep there in his bed, for both of them to be touched and have someone there all night long, and they’d gotten to where they didn’t exactly admit that _sleeping together_ had become the actual point, that snuggling up wasn’t pathetically needy.

But it didn’t hurt things either when the sex was this good, though, so there it was most nights, and plenty of mornings. Even sometimes during the day if the mood struck and they knew the kids wouldn’t interrupt. She moaned as he moved, slow and deep thrusts that made the sensation within her build and build--she’d learned he often liked taking time with it, even more so early in the morning. That was why she’d let press him down into the mattress like this. She liked being on top, usually making it hot and fierce, but nice to let him do most of the work and simply enjoy this easy and languid morning sex. Funny thing. She’d never fucked anyone in her life for nearly as long as she had Haymitch, by this point. Never much known what they liked. Never really cared, to be honest.

But there was something deeply appealing to it now. It had been cautious at first. Simple fucking, not too much touching, not looking too long or kissing too long. Not much lingering, for fear that somehow it would all fall apart. All about hurrying up and getting done, to the point where if she didn’t come, she insisted on taking care of it herself at first. He’d gotten anxious and embarrassed enough by it--him and his eternal sense of failing--that she’d cautiously let him touch her more beforehand, or after, and it went from there. Like how simply sleeping together opened the door to permission to simply cuddle up some nights without fucking, that became permission to dawdle a bit more, touch a bit more. 

She wrapped her legs around his, opening to him a bit more and giving a slight change of angle that let her take him in just a touch deeper, meet his moves a little better. Hands sliding down his back in a slow caress, hearing the swift intake of breath that halfway turned into a moan, she chuckled, knowing he could hear it. Though he returned the favor, his hand sliding between them to stroke her, fingers working in counterpoint to his thrusts, and now she nipped his shoulder as payback and to muffle her own sound of frustration, then raising her head and demanding, “Harder, dammit.” He obliged, grinning down at her with an expression of smug victory.

Sex was meaningless for so long, just something they did rather than felt, let alone enjoyed. And the patrons sure as hell hadn’t cared what they liked, nor would either of them have wanted those grasping, humiliating hands on them for too long anyway. It left both of them that walled up inside, not even knowing what either of them liked or wanted, used to merely enduring and trying to not think too much. Finding out how he worked, how she worked, what drove each of them nuts, discovering their own desires along the way--all of it happened only carefully, guardedly at first. Then it happened easier and more willingly. To the point where she’d eventually let him try being on top, confronting one more thing that scared her shitless. He’d repaid that by lying back and letting her take the lead more utterly than he ever had. It hadn’t always worked easily, moments of awkwardness or even frozen terror at the echoes of the past that still came up even now, but they’d managed.

She’d expected it to be like it had last year, the simple pleasure of his body against hers even in a cursory fuck, and maybe even an orgasm, since he was damn good in bed. She hadn’t expected this. Whatever _this_ was, him looking down at her with those grey eyes wide and dark with arousal, but looking right at her as she looked right back, hungry and intent like he couldn’t get enough of the sight of her, his hand stroking her cheek. She looked away only to stretch up and kiss him, needing that extra connection with him, fingers of one hand twining in that tousled hair.

“Can’t even look at you at all when we’re bundled up like this,” he complained when she drew back again. She had to agree. Maybe it was the simple familiarity of his body by now, but she liked looking at him. Liked looking at his face even more, though, seeing what he felt, what she could do to him.

“But you can feel me, though, mm?” She punctuated the point, squeezing him with her inner muscles. “And we could build a fire down in the parlor tonight, spread out a blanket…” Whether it was the sensation or the idea or both that spurred his groan, she didn’t know, but the sound of it, the enjoyment on his face, and the thought of him lit by fireglow--it all got to her, pushing her over the edge.

All those polite unspoken agreements of the things they didn’t talk about: the chaste nights of cuddling, foreplay turning to playful caresses, how they’d stopped avoiding each other’s eyes and instead deliberately looked. It mattered now, he mattered, much as they’d imagined it would be all nice friendly fucking without anything dangerous about it. She’d opened herself up to far more of him than simply his cock. He could take everything from her now, tear her apart because she’d let him in, and sometimes that thought still scared her shitless. But she couldn’t push him away and put the walls back up. He’d made himself equally vulnerable to how she could hurt him. 

It was sex, but it was also waking up with him each morning. It was sitting on the couch watching bad television and leaning into him. It was the way she came up behind him sometimes while he cooked breakfast and caught him around the waist, how he reached for her hand sometimes out in the woods. They’d forgotten that, but they’d learned it again. She’d come to depend on this--whatever _this_ was between them, afraid to name it as she was--as much as she did morphling. This feeling of being seen and mattering so much to him, and feeling so much that was anything but pain with a body and mind she’d previously done her best to numb to bear each day, was every bit as intoxicating. 

So if she used the burst of pleasure as an excuse to grip him even tighter, and held him close a little too long after he shuddered and cried out, and if she felt how he nuzzled the crook of her neck and then rolled off her only to reach for her again, drawing her in tight against him, neither of them would ever say anything about it. Pushing the quilt off a little, the covers suddenly far too hot given the sweat they’d worked up, she lay there with her head on his shoulder and a hand on his chest, his arm wrapped tightly around her waist as if he wanted to never let her go. She felt his fingers sweep through her hair, cradling the back of her head, and didn't feel the need to shudder or pull away. He kissed her then, even though it was all done and over, all slow and sweet and soft. All the things neither of them were supposed to have, but couldn't seem to push away. She couldn't help but answer him in kind, hand still splayed over his heart. No need to explain or apologize, no regrets or atonements--the same kind of peace she’d found in that needle, but not nearly as solitary. Too bad they couldn’t stay here in bed all day, every day. 

Three hours later, she felt that even more acutely, because the kitchen looked like a bomb had gone off. Dirty dishes filled the sink, fingers sticky with apple juice, little bits of peel and pips and apple flesh everywhere. The last of the apples would go off soon, already a little too mushy to slice and dry as they had earlier. So she and Peeta had set up, determined to tackle it and turn it all into apple butter to help preserve it. She still refused to consider applesauce, but it helped that the three Twelve victors had taken to eating apple butter like ducks to water with the smaller batch they’d made a couple months ago.

But apple butter was a pain in the ass in terms of labor intensity. Peeling, coring, slicing, dicing, and then hours and hours on the stovetop to reduce it down to the right consistency. The kitchen felt filled with steamy heat. “Good thing they’re making dinner over at your place tonight,” she grumbled, giving one of the three pots another vigorous stir. They were barely to the point where the apple bits turned to mush, let alone anywhere near the butter phase. “No way this place would be clean for it in time.”

“At least we’re to the point where the worst of the work’s done,” he pointed out. “Now it’s just waiting and the occasional stir.”

“Yeah.” She sighed, hands going to the small of her back, stretching out. “She’s not a bad cook, Katniss.” Not that she’d say so to her face.

“Better than me, actually,” Peeta admitted. “Baking’s all about precision. I’m good at tasting sweet stuff, but I’m lost with savory. I can follow a recipe like nobody’s business, and I can make it look good on a plate. But cooking’s so much about...whimsy. Inspiration.” 

She chuckled. “Throw crap in a pot and see whether it works?”

He grinned at her, wiping the back of his arm across his forehead to catch the sweat, sending some of his blond hair sticking up in messy clumps. “Yeah, more or less. I guess even with art I’ve got that precision bent. I plan it all out in my head and sketch it over and over before I ever paint it on a canvas, you know?”

“I’m more of the ‘wing it’ type myself, sorry.”

“Rooba mentioned she’s having a hard time selling off the chicken wings, actually. We could probably figure out something to do with them…” he mused.

“Feed them to that damn cat of yours,” she suggested wryly. The ugly orange thing was always underfoot every time she was over at their place. Putting down the spoon, she tossed over her shoulder casually, “Congrats on the sex, by the way.”

His blue eyes went almost comically wide. “Wha…”

“Be careful sleeping with your windows open. People walking outside might hear things,” she told him, trying to not grin too much at his discomfort. For whatever reason, teasing him was one thing, but there was a line where she couldn’t bear to make him squirm too much, feel too awkward and uncomfortable. Katniss was another story. “From the sounds she was making, apparently you’re doing a good job.”

He gave an awkward, strangled mutter at that, and then mumbled, “Thanks? I think?” She laughed, but tried to make sure he knew it wasn’t meant unkindly. “It’s just...it’s real. No dream. She loves me.”

“Yep.”

“Even with as screwed up as I am,” he said, tone turning softer, darker.

“She’s no golden princess either, kiddo.”

He took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded. “I know that. Now. I was in love with a stupid idea of her. But I love her. Katniss, the real Katniss. Even if she drives me nuts sometimes.”

“Probably would say the same for you, I’m sure.”

“And Haymitch?” He might not be as aggressive and irritating about it as Katniss, but he had a way of choosing his strikes so that they arrived silk-covered and unexpected, and she was unprepared. 

“What about him?” she said with a shrug, popping a slice of apple in her mouth.

“You love him?”

She laughed again, and this time there was more of an edge to it. “It’s not all black and white. Love or not love. We’re friends.”

“But you’re sleeping with him.” She glanced at him, and he told her, face poker-bland, “You both came back from the woods pretty rumpled up. Dirt on your clothes, leaves in your hair and all. I’m pretty sure you didn’t get that rolling down a hill.”

“You’d be surprised at that,” she muttered, remembering the tumble down that slope in the rainy mud. But she knew exactly what time he meant, a few weeks back. And he was right in his suspicion. The snares were empty and the last of the apples already picked over, so they’d ended up taking it with humor and making a rough bed of their clothes out there instead. The contrast between the cool autumn air on her skin and the warmth of him as she rode him, his black hair against the vivid flannel of her shirt in the burning-bright colors of the changing leaves. The scent of pine and loam, him and the fresh air, laughing about his digging out a pinecone stuck under the small of his back. His hands on her hips, all over her body, his eyes bright and intent on hers. She’d felt so light that day, so shameless, as if she really was just another ordinary Seven woman having a good time out in the woods with her man, and something she’d imagined long lost had come back to her. From something in Haymitch’s eyes, it was all the more meaningful to him too in some way. Things changed again after that: another irrevocable step taken, but they couldn't seem to do otherwise. 

“Maybe. But your shirt was buttoned wrong.” Shit. Trust him to observe that little detail.

She sighed. “So I’m fucking him. Or he’s fucking me. Or both. Whatever. What, you have a problem with it?” Her temper flared a little. “C’mon. Just because you’re so fucking young and think everyone over twenty-one's old doesn’t mean teenagers are the only ones entitled to get laid. Your p--” she realized mentioning his parents having sex would be a terrible idea, “I mean, plenty of people over forty have sex.”

“I’m not worried about that. You both seem a lot happier. He does look tired, though.”

“Lots of people do in winter.” Everyone tended to get more ragged and glum through the rough months.

“He seems more tired than he did last winter, though.” His tone was gentle, his eyes full of concern.

She dismissed it with a roll of her eyes. “Shit. All right, I’ll let him sleep at night. Promise.” She’d noticed it too, though. He hadn’t been sleeping well some nights, though, and it had nothing to do with the sex. He didn’t wake with nightmares either, because she knew full well what to expect from him there. Just restless, tossing and turning, unable to get to sleep.

“Will he be OK?” Now there was a hint of boyish anxiety, reminding her how young Peeta really was.

She turned back to the pot, giving it another hard stir. “He’ll be fine.” 

Though barely a week later, he didn’t want to get out of bed, mumbling that he had the flu, stumbling to the bathroom to throw up, sweating and feverish, complaining his stomach hurt. She slept in the room she hadn’t been in for two months now, to avoid catching whatever it was, and in hopes he’d sleep well that way until he felt better. Maybe her being there made him restless in his agitation, rather than providing comfort like it usually did. She tried giving him tea with honey, and a healthy shot of whiskey, mindful that he’d need it to keep from going into withdrawal. “I can see it on your face, so stop worrying about me,” he grumbled when she brought up oatmeal and he told her he wasn’t hungry. “I’ll be fine. Probably caught it from one of the workers when they were pestering me about all the damn logistics a few days ago.” He slept more and more, and it seemed like the best thing for him, given how badly he’d slept of late.

But then she came in on the third day and found him confused and with his skin a sickly yellow, and Katniss came to visit, to bring him some homemade soup. She freaked out at the sight of him, Haymitch barely responded to her, and the moment Johanna closed the door behind she demanded, “Is he dying? His skin looked like that in Thirteen, when they dried him out.” She could see the panic written all over Katniss’ face in that moment, grey eyes wide and scared.

She looked at the closed bedroom door. She should ask. He kept insisting it was flu and he’d be all right, but she’d suspected it was more. They were honest enough with each other she didn’t think he’d lied to hear to conceal something. Either he was in denial, or more likely, so confused by how lousy he felt that he couldn't tell.

She’d told him that she wouldn’t interfere in what plans he had, but he was so out of it that she wasn’t sure she could wait for him to be awake and aware. He looked worse and worse by the day. “I don’t know,” she admitted honestly. Indecisiveness wasn’t her strong suit. She’d decide, and she’d pay for it later if need be if he blamed her. But she couldn’t simply watch him die if it was that serious. If he wanted to go, he needed to choose it for himself. “But I need to use the phone.” 

Katniss nodded at that, leading the way down the stairs. Twelve hours later, and with numerous phone calls to Aurelius and Paylor and others, she was on a hovercraft with Haymitch on a stretcher beside her, headed to District Four for the hospital.

They whisked him in and away from her the moment she hit the doors, and she could only watch him go, peering through the glass at the steadily retreating figures. She remembered how people dear to her died when they were out of her sight, out of her reach. She went to go sit in the waiting room, strewn with inane magazines and trashy novels. She stirred once to go to the bathroom, and to inject a bit of morphling when she could feel the first uneasy tremors of withdrawal. Otherwise, it was all waiting, until finally a doctor in green scrubs came to talk to her, a grey-haired woman with ashy-gold Three skin, but a much warmer demeanor than any of the Three victors she’d met, including Spark, who she’d fucked once, long ago, to try to goad Finnick. 

_Liver failure. A transplant’s needed._ The words fell like stones in her stomach, making her want to throw up. He really was dying. No, she was supposed to have time to deal with this, to come to terms with it. “Are you his wife, maybe even his fiancee?” the doctor asked.

She looked at her hands. “No.” She heard her voice shaking. “Just...his friend.”

“He has absolutely no legal next of kin?” She shook her head mutely. He hadn’t for nearly as long as Johanna had been alive.

“Dammit,” the surgeon sighed. “With the new laws, we’ll have to get surgical consent from him when he wakes, then. Take a few days to get a donor liver here anyway. Until then, we’ll stabilize and detox him.” 

New laws? Oh, fuck. They’d heard a little about it on the newscasts--the new governments’ response to forced surgeries, including the ones inflicted on victors by the Gamemakers. It made sense, and the protection was there that hadn’t existed before, the right for people to decide for themselves. But maybe she should have claimed to be his wife. Obviously she was the closest he had to it. But she didn’t want the burden of making that decision for him. She knew what _she_ wanted, how desperately she wanted--needed--him to live. Katniss and Peeta would grieve, but they could get by without him, turn to each other, but if she lost him, that would be a blow she couldn’t ever recover from, no matter how long. Staring at the fish tank, stocked with tiny colorful fish and what looked like fake coral, she startled to feel someone sit down beside her. Turning, ready to confront the threat, the round face, green eyes, and deep olive skin, the black hair now cropped into a cute, short pageboy, shocked her. “Annie?”

“Hi, Johanna,” Annie said. Her willow-slim body had padded out a little with motherhood. Johanna looked down at the kid in her arms. So tiny still, but the face peering up at her curiously had Finnick’s sea-green eyes. But that shock of wispy, baby-fine hair was Annie’s inky black, not Finnick’s bronze. “This is Dylan.” 

She waved awkwardly to the baby. Dylan stared back at her, wide-eyed, as if not quite sure what to do with that yet. Well, he was only five months old, and arrived five weeks premature anyway, so he'd had catching up to do right from the beginning. She sympathized with that--not a Career-like thing to do. “I heard you were here and I figured,” Annie said softly, “you could maybe use some company?”

She inhaled a shaky breath, overwhelmed then by that kindness. “Thanks,” she said, hearing her voice wavering. Although looking at Annie, beneath the surface serenity, she couldn’t help but think the woman must be deeply lonely too, and came here to see one of the only people who understood her life, even if not entirely. For all she’d resented Annie for years, she hadn’t had Finnick, truly had him, for long at all. A few weeks after the wedding, and now here she was, widowed, new baby with no father, all the other Four victors dead. She’d ended up in Twelve with Peeta, but Annie had been there in the Detention Center too. Thinking of Haymitch in there, losing him, gave her more insight into everything Annie had lost last year when Finnick died in the Capitol. She shouldn’t have let Annie come back to Four to face it all alone, even if Johanna had been such a mess by the time they all parted ways. 

It helped, selfish as it might sound, to think of someone else having problems, because it meant she had something else she could focus on for now, and jolted her out of being wrapped up solely in her own mind. Annie came here to try to help, to be a friend, so maybe she could help in return. She tried to start it off with a soft pitch. “So, how have you been?”

~~~~~~~~~~

He woke and his body ached, as though he’d been beaten all over. He felt the presence of someone there beside him, and forced his dry, wooden tongue to croak, “Johanna?”

“No, it’s Roarke Aurelius.” 

“What,” he said, hearing the peevish tone entering his voice, “are you doing in Twelve?” More than that, what was Aurelius doing here, poking and prodding at him? 

“You’re in Four, in the new Primrose Everdeen Memorial Hospital.”

“Well, ain’t that a kicker.” Naming it for Prim--fitting, giving the little girl had wanted nothing more than to be a healer, but the cynical part of him noted that Paylor and her regime probably could make good use of that publicity and goodwill. They’d probably name the one in Twelve for her as well, which seemed more fitting anyway. Then the second part of the equation dropped. “Hospital? Oh, c’mon. I have the flu. No need for everyone to flip out.” But then, there had been the hazy impressions that he’d thought were only dreams. The feeling of flying, people talking, flickers of light: all of that must have been the journey here.

“Haymitch.” Haymitch fiddled with the blanket, stayed stubbornly silent, refusing to answer when called, like Aurelius thought he was some kind of a fucking pet. “You’re a very intelligent man. You know this isn’t the flu.”

Had he? The yellowish undertones to his skin, the pain in his stomach, the traces of blood in the vomit when he stumbled to the bathroom to puke. He’d felt so lousy and so tired he couldn’t think it all the way through, but in his heart, he’d probably known it was no simple flu, even if his conscious mind didn’t want to admit it. He sighed tiredly, reached up and rubbed his eyes, trying to wake himself up and focus. “Liver’s finally shit the bed, huh?” That seemed to be the only logical conclusion. Johanna must have called them. Shit--for her to freak out enough to make that call, he must have looked bad.

“You’re experiencing liver failure, yes.” Aurelius went into a calm medical spiel, and Haymitch listened as he ticked off the important points. Enough liver damage that he’d tipped it past the point of recovery, even if he gave up drinking entirely. The repeated bouts of sudden total withdrawal, and partial withdrawal the times the train delayed and he cut down the drinking, followed by going right back to pouring it down his throat, had shocked the liver even worse and probably put it on an accelerated timetable to failing out. They’d treated him for the withdrawal and luckily he’d been unconscious for it this time, but it would be a matter of months to live, at most, unless he got a liver transplant. 

He absorbed all that, somehow not surprised. He’d known someday he’d hit a wall with the liquor, and that would be the end. Although he’d never expected this, a clean hospital room, the IV in his arm, the steady beep of the monitors making sure he was still alive. All those years, he expected to die on his kitchen floor or the like, and for nobody to discover him for weeks or even months. Discovering a rotten corpse would hardly have given them a worse impression of Haymitch Abernathy than they’d already had, disgusting as they considered him. “And why is it that a shrink’s telling me this rather than an actual doctor?”

“Because I’m a trained physician as well, so I’m authorized to discuss it with you, and because of the psychological components of your addiction. Your transplant will be a brief physical recovery, but your mental recovery is going to need extensive therapy, Haymitch. I understand you and Johanna have found other things to do as a distraction, to reduce your alcohol and morphling use, but trying to find ways to ignore the pain won’t fix the problem. You’ll always depend upon alcohol until you address the addiction directly, and the PTSD and depression that are its root cause.”

He chose to ignore the last words there, and tried to convince himself Aurelius’ remark about him and Johanna wasn’t meant smarmily, because how could he even know? “Recovery?” As Aurelius went on again, throwing words like _stressor_ and _coping mechanism_ and _emotional overloading_ around, he felt like when he’d first been brought to the Capitol as a captive tribute, dumped in the middle of a too-big, too-overwhelming world whose rules and nature he could never understand. And just like the Capitol, here was Roarke Aurelius to tell him how it was going to be and what was going to happen to him, what they expected him to do or else, and it was too much to handle. He shut his eyes and settled back against the too-plush hospital pillow. “I’m tired,” he said loudly, interrupting the psychiatrist. “I’d like to sleep now.” His Twelve upbringing would have had him politely add, _if you don’t mind_ to that, but he stubbornly kept the words dammed up behind his tongue. He didn’t much care if Aurelius minded or not. Obviously he was tired and off his game to make it that blunt, rather than trying to dance around it deftly, hide his aim and make Aurelius cooperate without Haymitch himself seeming defiant. 

Aurelius sighed, and he heard the creak of vinyl as the man got up from the chair beside the bed. “We’ll talk more later, then,” he said.

He drifted aimlessly, for how long he didn’t know, dreaming fragmented dreams that dissolved the moment he woke, like the flash “spy note” paper sold as a novelty for Capitol kids that crumbled apart after being exposed to sunlight. Pulled up to the surface of consciousness again, Johanna was there this time, watching him closely. From the look of her, she hadn’t slept well, hair straggling in her eyes. It reminded him too much of the Thirteen infirmary, and his sitting there for hours waiting for her to wake. “Reverse deja vu?” he said jokingly.

He didn’t need to explain, because he saw the flash of comprehension in her face. “You scared the shit out of me.” A small smile, wry and almost exasperated, as she went on, “Not easy to do. Congratulations.”

“So you’re the one who called them.”

She raised an eyebrow in a loftily sarcastic expression, turning to face him more fully now, right ankle crossed over her opposite knee. “Was I supposed to let you die?”

He couldn’t be angry, but he couldn’t directly thank her either. It was all a muddle, too much in his mind and his heart, and it wasn’t even whatever medications they had him on, because he didn’t feel muzzy-brained at all. He simply shook his head, trusting she’d understand something from that. “The kids?” he asked.

She sighed, a quick and irritated huff. “I called Paylor’s office, tried to get an exemption so Katniss could come here. She was freaking out when I told her you were sick, trust me. They wouldn’t bite, especially since I’m not her guardian. Fucking bureaucrats. And of course, Peeta wasn’t going to leave her alone. Rooba agreed to look after them--not that they really need it.”

“Maybe it was better that she doesn’t come here anyway.”

“You mean you being…sick,” not like Johanna to skip out on saying “dying”, as blunt as she usually was, and that troubled him, “or dealing with her mom being here?”

He couldn’t help but smile in acknowledgment of that sharp wit and how quickly she’d picked up on it. “Both. I don’t think she’s ready to come to terms with Perulla yet.” Whatever way it went, either forgiveness or forgetting she had a living mother, Katniss wasn’t to that state yet. 

“Haven’t seen her yet, and we’ve been here a couple days already.”

Knowing Perulla, she probably had avoided Johanna so as to not provoke any unpleasantness with a no-win. If Perulla asked about Katniss, she invited open criticism for legally abandoning her own kid, and if she didn’t, she’d be assumed heartless. Sometimes it was best to step aside and avoid it all, and honestly, he wasn’t sure _he_ could deal with Perulla right now either. There was no room in him at the moment to fit in anyone else’s problems. “Ah, if they’d told you I was a goner, they’d have given the exemption if you called again. They wouldn’t refuse her the chance to have a tearful goodbye at the bedside of her dear old dying mentor.” As was, with his being sick but apparently expected to go home, letting Katniss out of her plea deal and her planned oblivion away from the public was too much to risk. But if he’d died and it was known they’d held her back from being with him at the end, it would be a PR disaster for Paylor’s regime. He grinned to himself, imagining Plutarch’s utter meltdown at it. Might have been nice to be that big an inconvenience.

“You’re stable. But the liver won’t get better. They told me if they send you home as-is, you’ve got a few months, maybe six if you’re really lucky and you take some drugs to prolong things.”

“Aurelius told me it wouldn’t be long. Though he didn’t put a specific timeline on it.” He couldn’t help but feel relieved that they’d told her already and it wasn’t up to him to explain. And maybe even a little grateful to Aurelius as well, for sparing her that burden. Six months--mid-May. It would be long enough, but only it he was guaranteed that span, and he wasn’t. “So.”

“So,” she echoed. He glanced at her face for a moment, trying to read her expression and her eyes to get some sense of where she stood, what she felt. Her face was a studied blank. “The way I see it, you’ve got a couple options.”

“Do tell.” He pushed himself up against the pillows, trying not to wince as it sent a ripple of pain throughout his sore body. His abdomen in particular felt like someone was in there ripping into it with sharp blades. It reminded him too much of Sapphire’s axe in his gut, all those years ago.

“You go home, and you hope they can maybe limp you along at least until Peeta turns nineteen, or until it’s close enough they won’t insist on appointing another guardian.”

“Option one, yes. Option two, I take the transplant, I go home, I become Aurelius’ guinea pig and go to therapy like a good boy.”

“Yeah. And option three.”

“Three?” He looked at her in confusion. He hadn’t come up with an option three.

She laughed once, lowly. “I’m ahead of Haymitch Abernathy on giving the plan another angle? My, my.” Those hazel-brown eyes met his steadily, burning fiercely with sheer intensity. “Option three,” she said, voice sinking down so low that he could barely hear, “is that I sneak you a nightlock pill. Either here, or back in Twelve if you want to say your goodbyes.” 

He stared at her. That option hadn’t crossed his mind, although admittedly, it was mainly the notion that it wasn’t something he could control. It required someone else to step in and have a hand in it, and Aurelius sure as hell wasn’t going to offer it as an option. He hadn’t expected it from her. “Why?” he blurted, unable to say anything else.

“You want the practical or the philosophical reasons?”

“Practical first.”

“You’ll likely be in pain until you die. You might end up pissing blood, or having constant bruising or bleeding that won’t stop, or swelling in your brain until you go into a coma. That’s not living. That’s just trying to not die until the kids are recognized as adults and they’re safe. So I’ll step up as guardian if need be and spare you that worry. Katniss might not be thrilled that I’m legally the boss of her, but she’ll put up with it for six months, and I’ll try to not enjoy her grumpiness about it too much.” 

He nodded, drawing all that in, and sensing they hadn’t told her all of it either, that it would be even worse than that. Aurelius hadn’t gone into the grisly details like that, assuming as he did that Haymitch would of course take the damn liver and rejoice in a second chance at life. “And the philosophical?”

Her eyes didn’t leave his. “You asked me if you’d earned dying without suffering. I told you that you had. And nobody’s ever bothering caring about what you wanted. It’s always been about what you’re expected to endure for everyone else’s sake. This time, it’s your choice.”

The gratitude that washed over him at that practically had him blubbering like a baby, but he caught himself on the edge of it, letting out a shaky exhalation, breathing in and out a few times until he’d mastered himself. Nobody had offered him a choice. It had always been about helplessly being dragged along by his obligations and his debts of honor, ever since he was a sixteen-year-old child. Couldn’t say “no” to all those Capitolites who raped him, couldn’t say “no” to Snow without fear of consequences, and so he’d gotten to the point where he couldn’t say “no” because he felt like he didn’t deserve much of anything, that his entire existence was a sorry apology and an ever-deepening pit of failures and things owed. 

Even last winter, he’d had to go to Twelve with Katniss because nobody else would, and he couldn’t bear for her to be in that graveyard of a dead district, abandoned, traumatized, and all alone, and because he’d felt like he owed her, bringing her into the war that had cost her so much. Would he have chosen otherwise, without that shackle? After the trial some of Paylor’s people came to him, making hints about him getting involved with law or politics and a brilliant career, and maybe he would have done it, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to stand it, but he’d never been able to choose for himself.

She’d let him make his own choice, and it almost overwhelmed him, seemed like far too much to bear to truly be in control of his fate for the first time in twenty-six years. And yet, it wasn’t only the power of that notion that unnerved him. The thought of her--the warmth of her, and how she crowded into him in the bed. The lemon smell of her hair, fresh-washed and silky beneath his fingers, and knowing how tough it was for her to endure washing it. That smirk of hers over the chessboard or in bed as she knew she’d gotten to him. How he woke up with her each morning, astonished but more content than he'd been in a long time. Holding her on the couch while some stupid movie was on the television. Making her ma’s apple dumplings, and the way the memories came out, hesitant at first and then in a rush. Walking in the woods and marking maples and birches for later, her steady fingers tying a snare. They’d made something together, and the thing he’d been afraid to put a name to stood there. But he'd opened himself up to it anyway, because he couldn't help it, couldn't help but want that, and with her. He'd let her in and couldn't even make himself regret the joy of that, even as it scared him shitless. 

It was nothing like it had been with Briar, like a burst of fireworks, marvelous and overwhelming. This had come over him with the quiet of a rising dawn, but it cast everything into bright light after a long darkness. He’d tried to shut it out, close the curtains and ignore it, but it was there anyway.

And she couldn’t have matched him in it as she had, unless she’d felt something too. “Friends” seemed too pale a word, but the word “love” hung there, frightening in all its weight and implications. If she cared--even if she didn’t exactly love him back--how could she stand there and so coolly talk about him dying? Disengaged wasn’t her style. “And you’ve got no stake in this? No opinion?” he asked, probing carefully.

“I said it’s _your_ choice. Not mine.”

“So really, you don’t care if I ask you to go now and do it.” It felt cruel, prodding her like that, but he couldn’t bear indifference from her, even in the name of kindness. If he had any hope of making it through, of taking what Aurelius offered, he couldn’t do it alone, couldn’t do it if she could so easily write him off. This couldn’t be the same woman who’d asked him a few months ago, so bluntly and awkwardly, to tell him if he aimed to kill himself, so she’d have time to be ready for it. 

Her voice and face were carefully even again as she answered, “If that’s what you want.”

“I’ve done the ‘do it for everyone else’ abnegation bit for twenty-six years. I’d just as soon see you not take that mantle on. Besides, when’s the last time Johanna Mason had _no_ opinion on anything?”

Something flashed in her eyes, mouth drawing tight in irritation, and he tried not to smile, because it would be too easy for her to take it as amusement. He wasn’t one of those idiots who’d tell a woman she was beautiful when she was angry. He’d seen women, angry and otherwise, deal enough damage both physically and mentally to ever buy into some condescending myth of female rage as adorably harmless. Johanna’s anger wasn’t beautiful, it was honestly fucking terrifying, because he’d seen her brutally tear people apart with her words. But something about her moved by any kind of passion, the liveliness in her eyes and the will to fight and give it her all, was magnificent, in the way that a hawk on the hunt was, wonderful and potentially dangerous all at once. “Yeah, of course I’d love to hear that dying’s preferable to being with me, who wouldn’t? But hey, I’m used to being nobody’s choice.”

He managed to not laugh, even in relief, but the shock of the words helped suppress the urge. The ferocity there, the hint of anguish that told him that it mattered--dammit. The boys in Seven who’d never noticed her, Finnick who’d obliviously passed her by, and here now she thought yet another man ignored her, dismissed her. “You’re enough,” he told her, feeling awkward as he said it, but moved to do so anyway, because he thought she needed it, deserved to hear it said openly. “More than enough. Always have been. It’s...whether I’m enough for you.”

She gave an extravagant roll of her eyes, hands thrown out wide in an exaggerated gesture. “Like I’ve stayed in Twelve this long and fucked you and slept with you and stayed in your house and spent all that time with you, only because I didn’t have better options?”

He raised an eyebrow and inquired with a cuttingly polite sarcasm, “Did you have better options?” A wounding kind of question, perhaps, but it needed to be asked. There was a difference between her staying out of nowhere else to go, and actually wanting to be there, and that was the crux of this whole thing, wasn’t it? They’d drifted into this whole thing, and maybe they could have continued more or less contentedly drifting for the rest of their lives had this not happened. But right now the pressure was there, and the question had to be asked.

“No,” she answered him with a defiant scowl, “but maybe it’s more than that now. And don’t think it doesn’t matter. That you don’t. But I’m not in the mood to have you someday claiming you only stuck around for my sake. You do this for you, or not at all.”

He shook his head, not to deny her words, but bemused by the enormity of it all. It felt like the wall of a prison had suddenly knocked down and there the bright wide world stood, full of so many possibilities. By turns enticing and frightening, because he didn’t know if he could make it out there after so long, warped and shaped by the cramped cell he’d been in and gotten so used to over the years. That, at least, was comfortably familiar. “It’s...yeah, OK, I get it. You’re right I can’t go on just because you want me to. But we know I can get by without you. You can get by without me. But like we said, that’s surviving. If I do this, everything changes.”

“How so?” From her tone, she wasn’t totally clueless, but more looking to see if he could shape words to what was within both of them.

He let out a tired laugh, looking around at the pale peach walls and the numbingly calm pictures of flower-bedecked fields. He thought of the Meadow, beneath the snow all ripped up dirt and thousands of corpses. Maybe flowers would grow there again someday, in spite of it all. Maybe it wasn’t all the end, but right now, to move forward asked him to put his faith in things, he who’d been able to believe in nothing for so long. “I’m such a good little victor. If I want to live, once again, it’s only possible because someone died.” That liver would be from a dead person, with the burden of their life. “I can’t be like the kids with their fucking death-book, crying over the ones that died and promising to live a good life for them.”

She slid onto the bed next to him, her hip nudging his thigh, her hand reaching for his. Gratefully, he took it, letting himself bask in the feeling of contact, of her being there and caring. “No. You can’t. You have too many. And they’ve been with you too long. Living can’t be a burden.” She gave him a wry smile. “Idiot. You’re not talking about the elephant, huh?”

He gazed around the room in mock astonishment. “Really? Where?”

“We kind of happened into this. Didn’t want to talk about it or make demands or whatever, just take it for what it’s worth. But we can’t pretend it’s nothing. That...we don’t have something here, that it doesn’t matter. Which means choosing to get off our asses and do something with it. Or not.”

She was right. Passively being together was a different thing from actually choosing to be with her, and seeing where it would go. It meant opening up the rest of the way and letting her in entirely, and all the possibility that came with it. The thought of it made him dizzy, and he wasn’t sure whether it was eagerness or fear, most likely some spiraling combination of both. He breathed in deeply, trying to center himself as best he could. “I want you to stay. In Twelve. With me. I need you, all right? Not to make me want to stay alive, but to make me want to actually live. Because the idea of it’s fucking terrifying, it’s going to be a long road, and I can’t do it alone. Without you, I mean, it’s not that I could do it with just anyone...” he corrected himself hastily, well aware he was rambling by this point and only hoping he didn’t sound like a complete and utter jackass. 

Her expression was stunned, eyes wide and frozen for a moment, and if she laughed or make some glib quip, it might destroy him. Instead, she leaned over the edge of the bed, and he heard first one thump, then the other, of her shoes hitting the floor. She leaned in, one hand over him. “Anywhere you don’t want me to touch?”

He stared up at her, now totally confused. “I’m in a hospital bed in a gown with my ass hanging out, my liver’s decided to make an end of it, and you’re feeling frisky?” Not exactly the reaction he’d expected to him asking her to stay with him, offering himself up to her like that.

She let out an awkward snort. “Ah, you wish.” Left to decipher that, he figured out she only wanted to get cozy.

“Oh.” He gestured towards his stomach. “Right side’s a bit painful.” Carefully, she maneuvered her way close, cuddled up against his side, head resting on his shoulder, one hand holding on to his. “So?” he prompted.

“So,” she answered, words coming slowly, “I invited Annie to come live in Twelve. She needs people who get her. She’s lost everyone who understood.” Mags, Finnick, Carrick, all the dead Four victors, and for the first time he felt lucky in being Twelve, in being the only district who had more than one lonely victor left. Such a reversal of how it had been most of his life, with all the rest of them having other victors there, while he never did. Really, he should never have left her alone. 

He smirked, glancing down at the top of her head and knowing she couldn’t see it, but moved to do it all the same. “Good. Should have figured. And you joke about me adopting strays.” But she’d been right to do it, and the fact she’d felt comfortable enough to offer safe harbor to Annie told him enough. Twelve was home to her now, his house was hers too, and that notion warmed him from within, that spark rising a bit brighter. 

“It’s not gonna be easy. And with Annie, that’s three people who’ll be nagging us to do the whole therapy bit.”

“Aurelius already made it clear if they pop in a new liver, I’m in therapy, with an expectation of no more drinking, ever.” He inhaled, bracing himself. This relationship was about two minutes old, if it even existed yet--were they still in the acknowledging phase or what? And yet here he was placing a term, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too much. “If I get off the liquor, you get off the morphling--do it and have them keep watch over you here while I’m recovering from the surgery to make sure you’re OK. It’s one thing if we’re both going to hell like we were, but if they’re making me get clean, I can’t watch you keep going down the hole. And I can’t watch this,” he gestured to himself, to the hospital bed, “happen to you eventually. And it will.” He’d watched Max and Poppy turn into living skeletons, and even Maribelle had walked a good ways down that road. He couldn’t be there in five, ten, twenty years, having watched her slowly kill off everything vibrant in her, everything that made her Johanna. 

It wouldn’t be so simple as declaring they were done. He’d probably still want a drink, every day of his life, especially on bad days. He’d never be able to keep morphling in the house in case of injuries, so it wouldn’t tempt her, and she couldn’t keep liquor around because of him. He had to admit Aurelius was right: it was one thing to reduce the liquor and find other ways of keeping his mind busy, but he always ended up circling back to it in the end when it got to be too much. It was like a tumor, and painkillers let him ignore it, but the damn thing was in there and kept growing, kept slowly killing him. Only by uprooting it all, digging into all that pain and shame and the entire nightmare mass of it, could he maybe find his way out of it. If he was strong enough to do it, and with Johanna there, he just maybe could make it. The thought of all of it made him sick with fear, but the way it had been was no way to live, and she, and the opportunity she presented, were worth it. 

Beetee couldn’t take it, left alone with only the weight of his guilt. So he’d taken the nightlock. But he couldn’t, not now. Not with even this small hope that there might be a way to move forward, to have something different. She’d let herself lean on him and given him the same support, and even now, she was the only one in years who’d care enough to give him a choice, and thus, a real chance. That, more than any flowery words, told him how deep things ran for her. 

She didn’t reply right away, and her fingers tightened in his. “OK,” she said finally, in barely more than a whisper. “So we do this, and we do it together.” She paused for a couple of heartbeats and added, “I don’t know what’ll happen.”

“Me either,” he admitted. He couldn’t even talk about ordinary lovers’ things yet--a toasting, whatever wedding things they did in Seven, redoing the house. It was all too fragile and new, too big a thing to reduce down to those details. But he could start to imagine a place where that existed, where he could start to think about the future. Little things like that maple syrup boil she talked about, and seeing if the geese came back with the spring thaw. Bigger things, like maybe a kid or two, in time, if she wanted that too. 

They might succeed. They might fail too, and probably would more than once along the way. But if they did, they might be strong enough to try again, given fresh direction and purpose like this. They’d have Katniss and Peeta and now Annie too, all of them woven tight into a web to help catch each other. He wouldn’t be alone. He leaned down and kissed the top of her head, smelling the clean scent of her hair--an unfamiliar shampoo, too floral for her, but it must have been what they had available. That didn’t bother him. She was still Johanna, no matter what. “But we’ll try. We’ll live.”


End file.
